Checklist / How to

Checklist / How to for Standard Operating Procedures

Before digging into the schedule of tasks, you'll need to decide retention periods for the files covered by the backup processes listed below. For example, how far back in time do you need to go to recover a document in a desktop user's My Documents or downloads folders? Your legal department might have a different answer than your manager. Be sure you have the bases covered.

Hourly or x times per day

Depending on your decision about the timeline in which you must have SQL data restored, run a transaction log backup of wbdb and wbdbcla, then truncate the log after each log backup completes. Be sure the log backups are available with the full backup they "belong to" so that you can restore and roll forward when and if the need arises.

Daily tasks

Backup desktop documents/downloads. This step should be automated using tools like BackBlaze or similar. If you prefer a private location, you can use a tool that pushed data to Amazon Web Services S3 or similar services.
Make a full SQL backup of wbdb and wbdbcla.
Make an incremental backup of all servers. Of course, a full backup would be OK, too, if you have a large enough maintenance window.

Weekly tasks

• Make a system backup of each desktop to an external drive. A current system recovery disk should be available for each machine. Windows will create the system recovery disk. This feature will allow you to quickly get a machine running again after replacing a hard drive without reinstalling Windows and all your software. Once complete, then you can restore documents and downloads from your last daily backup.
Make sure anti-virus software is up to date. We recommend you use automatic updates as a criterion for selecting an anti-virus package.
If you can delete files that are past their retention date, run those deletion processes. Rotate weekly backups off-site.

Monthly tasks

Run full SQL backups and full server hard drive backups. These backups should be a separate cycle from the weekly full+log SQL backups. They give your management the ability to restore files as of a particular finance/tax period. It is unlikely they will need them, but court appearances and tax situations sometimes demand it.
Rotate monthly backups off-site.

Quarterly tasks

Practice restoring a server to a new VM or a machine with a new hard drive.
- Make sure the process and your step-by-step restore process documentation matches, as these things tend to happen when the expert is on a plane, on vacation in a place that does not have cell coverage, etc. While you will be able to recover from the temporary absence of your expert, having documentation of the steps they use will increase the likelihood that your attempt will be successful.

Decide how you will confirm that the restore was successful.
- Are all the files that were there beforehand also there after the restore?
- Are the record counts in SQL databases the same?
- Will you use some other or an additional means?