Recovery point and recovery time.
RECOVERY POINT
How much data you can afford to lose, measured in time.
If you back up daily at midnight and a failure occurs at eleven at night, you lose twenty-three hours of work.
For a brochure site that may be irrelevant. For a shop, that is a day of orders.
Your backup frequency should match what you can genuinely afford to lose.
RECOVERY TIME
How long you can afford to be offline while restoring.
A restore from a full account backup takes time. A rebuild from scratch takes considerably longer.
BEING REALISTIC
Most small businesses tolerate a few hours offline and cannot tolerate losing a week of data.
That implies daily database backups and a restore procedure you have actually tested.
WHAT TO WORK OUT
What would a day offline cost you What would losing a week of content or orders cost you Does your current arrangement match those answers
THE COMMON GAP
People who would lose thousands from a day of missing orders, backing up weekly, to the same server.
