Total available storage in GB. This is important as it helps us estimate how large the server storage utilization may grow to consume without adding additional physical or virtual storage.

Total storage in use/consumed by the server OS, files, and other data.

Your backups may take up considerable upload bandwidth. The backup regimen you choose will likely impact network performance. Most small and medium sized organizations opt for a single backup every 24 hours. This backup often kicks off after normal working hours and completes within a few hours. Organizations with highly limited upload bandwidth may find that their backups never finish or run during normal working hours thus causing performance issues for others attempting to utilize the internet and other resources. Lastly, internet performance can cause extreme delays when performing periodic "full" or "seed" backups. Active monitoring, remediation, and manipulation of backups is key to ensuring that your data is protected.

When performing offsite backups the time to recover is limited by the available bandwidth. Example: A 1,000GB backup set being downloaded on a 100Mb internet connection will take approximately 22 hours to download. During this download time the organizations network will be near fully saturated and performance will be greatly degraded.

This is the rated speed between local backup repository and production server which is typically 1,000 Mbps (Gig LAN) for smaller organizations and 10,000 Mbps or greater for organizations with Cat6 or fiber interfaces and supported switching technology.

Most backups such as Veeam consistently compress data at approximately 50%. If you do not know the compression ratio for the backup solution you are using be sure to input here. This is an important number when calculating recovery time. It is also important to know if your backup solution first hydrates data before restoration or if compressed data is restored and hydrated on the recovery or production server.

How many days of incremental backups will you retain? Incremental backups are backups of changed or new data that occur on a set schedule. Incremental backups are more efficient than full backups since they only pickup changed data and can the backups can be rolled up into a full backup during recovery. It is recommended to retain at least 30 days of backup on premise and off premise. Historically ransomware threat actors have spent up to 45 days inside compromised systems before launching ransomware encryption. In 2024 the dwell time has greatly diminished with threat actors now commonly performing smash and grabs where ransomware is launched within 5 to 10 days. It is imperative to have solid backups that will exceed the most likely threats to your disaster recovery efforts. Most organizations will have a minimum of 90 days of backup both onsite and offsite while others may have 120 days with rotating full backups. No matter your choice, be sure that it meets your organizational needs for recoverability.

How often does the backup run? Example 24 = backup is once every 24 hours or once per day. 1 = backup is once per hour.

Enter RPO in hours as in 1 day = 24 hours. RPO = Recovery Point Objective. RPO is the amount of data you can afford to lose and/or recreate. Example: You perform one backup per day at noon. At 11:59 AM your server dies and is unrecoverable. This means that you will lose 24 hours of change on your server. If this is your EMR, ERP, CRM, or other mission critical server, can you r business survive without that data and/or is it possible to recreate the data? Most organizations opt for a 24 hour RPO due to the cost of having shorter RPOs. You can go as short as 1 minute but know there will be additional cost and infrastructure required to meet that goal.

Enter RTO in hours as in 1 day = 24 hours. RTO = Recovery Time Objective. RTO is the amount of time you can be without your applications and data. For example a 24 hour RTO means that your organization can survive for 24 hours without the services, files, applications, etc. that are stored on this server. There are many factors the go into the RTO. RTO is heavily dependent on the resilience of your backups. A very short RTO will require advanced infrastructure such as mirrored or replicated servers, duplicate server environments, and more. Another important factor in RTO is to have access to a repository to recover data onto. If your building burns down and you need to order a replacement server before you can install your data and be operational then your actual RTO may be days or weeks in that scenario. The time it takes to recover data is an important part of the calculation but there is much more to consider.