Plain-English backup planning

Find the Right Backup Strategy for Your Workload

Answer ten practical questions. The selector maps workload, RPO, RTO, restore urgency, retention, ransomware risk, and budget into a recommended backup approach you can discuss with a team or vendor.

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Decision path Workload first, recovery targets second, risk controls last.

Rule based MVP

Protect Files, databases, VMs, SaaS, cloud, Kubernetes

Recover RPO, RTO, point-in-time restore

Harden Retention, immutability, archive, testing

10quiz questions

9strategy families

1copyable plan

Selector Quiz

Pick the closest answer. You can revise anything and the recommendation will update immediately.

17 signals

1. What do you need to protect?

2. How often does the data change?

3. How much downtime can you tolerate?

4. How much data loss is acceptable?

5. Do you need point-in-time recovery?

Yes Maybe No Unsure

6. Is the workload database-heavy?

7. Is long-term retention required?

8. Is ransomware resilience a priority?

9. What budget posture fits best?

10. What restores are most likely?

Environment Inputs

These make the recommendation more specific by estimating scale, storage pressure, operational difficulty, and recovery confidence.

Smarter signals

Protected data volume 1000 GB

Approximate source data size before backup overhead.

Daily change rate 8%

How much of the data changes on a normal day.

Backup window 6 hr

Short windows favor snapshots, synthetic fulls, or replication.

Archive retention 1 yr

Years of monthly or annual copies outside the hot restore window.

Operations team size 3 people

Small teams benefit from simpler chains and automated testing.

Offsite copySecond location or cloud target. Immutable copiesObject lock, WORM, or hardened repository. Air-gapped copyOffline, disconnected, or separate admin plane. Automated testsScheduled restore validation or sandbox boots.

Recommended path

Full backup + incremental backup

This gives you a dependable full restore point while keeping day-to-day storage growth under control.

Primary Full backup + incremental backup

Secondary Snapshot-based protection with immutable copies

Frequency Weekly full, daily incremental, more often for priority data.

Retention Keep 30-90 days online, then move monthly copies to lower-cost storage.

Restore tests Test one file restore monthly and one full workload restore quarterly.

Compare The Shortlist

3 options

Copyable Planning Summary

For internal notes

Strategy Intelligence

Medium confidence

Recovery readiness 72

Good baseline, but restore testing and immutability decide whether it is real.

Estimated storage 2.0 TB

Planning estimate for hot retention plus protection overhead.

Restore tier Standard

Backup-first recovery with targeted fast-restore options.

Operational load Medium

Complexity estimate based on team size, backup window, and strategy mix.

Recommended Architecture

4 layers

30-Day Backup Cadence

Daily rhythm

Full or synthetic full Incremental or snapshot Log/CDP checkpoint Archive copy

Next Actions

Implementation brief

Quick glossary

What the selector is choosing between

Backup strategy is less about memorizing terms and more about matching recovery promises to the shape of the workload.

Incremental vs differential backup

Incremental saves changes since the last backup. Differential saves changes since the last full. Incremental is leaner; differential can be faster to restore.

Synthetic full backup

A backup system builds a new full restore point from an earlier full plus changes, usually without rereading the entire production workload.

Replication vs backup

Replication helps availability. Backup preserves recovery history. If bad data replicates, backup is what gives you a clean earlier point.

CDP vs backup

Continuous data protection targets very small data-loss windows. It is useful for critical systems, but still needs retention, testing, and isolated copies.