By Kirk Drake | January 5, 2014

How do I figure out how much data I will need to send offsite?

If you are contemplating installing a data vaulting or offsite backup solution you will need to calculate and plan for your bandwidth and storage requirements. This blog will help in providing some general information on how to plan for getting your data offsite.

Audit Existing Servers

When figuring out how much data needs to be sent offsite for a daily backup, we recommend doing an audit of all used disk space on every server and workstation that will be included in the backup operation. Using that total amount of data, a good starting estimate would be 3% of the total used space. For example, 175GB of data should produce about 5GB of data that would change through the course of a day, and therefore need to be sent offsite. 175GB X 0.03 = 5.25GB

While the 3% rule is an accepted rule of thumb in the industry, there are more in depth ways to calculate your daily rate of change that require an in-depth analysis of your database operations. These calculations vary depending on the type of database you are running, the kind of data being stored, and how the database is designed and can be very complicated.

Do you need help in calculating how much data you will need to send offsite? If so e-mail info@ongoingoperations.com or fill out this form on the contact us page.