What follows are our basic suggestions for best practices surrounding data backup and recovery with NovaBACKUP software.

Offsite (xSP/Cloud)

Use offsite backup with critical data to help avoid a single point of failure.
Select only critical information to backup online (offsite) to minimize the amount of data being transferred, reduce online storage size, and increase overall performance.
(xSP/Cloud) To enable FastBIT transfers for a file, that file must have at least 2 copies previously backed up on the server.
(xSP/Cloud) To enhance FastBIT, make sure the Work directory has free disk space totaling at least 3x the total amount of data you want to transfer.
(xSP/Cloud) Make sure ports 308 and 309 are open in both directions.

Local

Schedule your backup jobs instead of starting them manually to make sure they do get created on a regular basis.
Schedule weekly Full Backups and daily Differential Backups to increase the stability and performance of your backups and to maximize your efficiency.
Use more than one device for your backups, ideally alternating between devices regularly to avoid a single point of failure. (3-2-1 rule of backup: 3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 offsite)
Schedule jobs to run after office hours to ensure that all information is current and that the software will not interfere with normal procedures while it runs.

Update Disaster Recovery (DR) images monthly. More frequent images are generally inefficient and less frequent images can be outdated.
DR Images can be scheduled to run monthly on a specific day of the week by scheduling it to run "Daily" but only on a single day (for example, Saturday) and setting it to run only every 4th occurrence. This tells the software to run a DR Image every 4th Saturday.
Create a new DR Image any time new hardware or software is installed to minimize compatibility issues.
Create a new DR Image before major Windows Updates
If your machine requires a hardware replacement, make sure any new hardware is as similar as possible (preferably identical) to minimize compatibility issues. Processor architecture must be the same i.e. Intel vs AMD, 32-bit (x86) vs 64-bit (x64).
Ideally, keep 2-3 DR images stored separately to avoid a single point of failure.
Store at least one recent DR image at an offsite location to protect your data in the event of a serious disaster, such as a flood or fire at your business. Bank Safe Deposit boxes are great for this.
If backing up to a removable device, keep one device onsite and one device offsite, and swap these after each run. You will always have the previous set of data offsite in case of a major disaster.
Keep in mind that if you need to restore this DR Image, the destination drive will need to be the same size or larger as the source.

Set Backup Jobs to run as a Domain Administrator with credentials that can be recognized by Exchange/SQL.
Our Microsoft SQL Server plugin supports Microsoft SQL Server only, will not work with MySQL or Pervasive.
Only one instance of Microsoft SQL Server can be installed and running - other instances will cause a conflict.

An Untested backup cannot be considered a good backup until tested. Make sure to regularly verify the information you need is backed up in a way you can restore it.
Stop any non-essential services when running a restore to increases overall stability during the restore.
Ensure that the hardware configuration has not changed, or is as similar as possible to the configuration when the data was backed up.
The "Restore File to Alternate Location" setting allows you to restore files without overwriting existing information. This can be found in the [Settings] for the Restore job.

Notification Options can be found under Settings > Notification.
Set logging to Summary (default) unless you are troubleshooting an issue with backing up/restoring.
Email logs to monitor your backup jobs remotely.
You can configure Summary Reports on the Logs tab, these contain a summary of the jobs that have ran since the previous summary report. BONUS: These also show available disk space