Here is an obvious yet important thing:

When you make decisions between the costs of development and the costsof operation , it is quite important to get theactual costs right (on both sides); otherwise you will be balancingthings based on bad data, which usually doesn't end well. One would liketo think that this is easy, but in fact there has usually been a lot ofmythology about these costs floating around (I suspect especially sowhen the actual costs are changing rapidly).

The classical

One of the reasons I think we can go with our planned backup schedule is how I think that users will perceiveit. This matters because unless you're lucky enough to have a specificbackup schedule mandated from high, part of setting up your backupsystem is managing user expectations of what you can deliver and makingsure that they feel that it's reasonable.

(Let us take it as given that you cannot just ask the users what theywant and then deliver all of it. Users don't want

Part of the fun of backups is trying to work out how much backup storageyou need in order to do a decent job of recovering from mistakes. Unlessyou are lucky, you will not have a specific mandate about how much tosave for how long, which means that it is up to you to figure out ascheme that you can afford, that provides enough coverage, and thatpeople will be happy with; there are no one size fits all answers.

We didn't do anything sophisticated for our old