Best Practices: Backup Job Size

Overview:
The aim of this document is to address the question of backup job size when configuring different
types of backup jobs. Generally, we've seen tasks perform best when they are kept to a size under
200 GB.

Recommendation:
Data Jobs:
This is the most common type of backup job and the easiest job to configure over the
recommended size. Large selections can typically be split into multiple backup jobs using wildcards
on folder names.
Exchange DR/VSS:
In Exchange 2007, it was possible to create a storage group from multiple information stores.
Although it may seem like a good idea to split large backups at the information store level, this is
not recommended and should be avoided due to the way that Exchange shares transaction logs in
a storage group. (Transaction logs will not be truncated if split at the information store level).
When splitting Exchange DR/VSS backups, best practice is to create separate jobs at the Storage
Group level.
Exchange 2010, 2013, and 2016 use databases instead of storage groups. It is important not to
exceed Microsoft’s recommendations for the databases sizes. You can place multiple small
databases in a single backup job. It is recommended that you create individual jobs for each of
your larger databases that exceed the size above. The end goal would be not to exceed the size
recommendation above unless it was a single database in its own job.

You can run your exchange backups simultaneously as long as you aren’t backing up the same
database or storage group in multiple jobs.

SQLDatabases:
The same principles of using wildcards can be applied to split up SQL database backups on a large
SQL server containing multiple databases.
Exceptions:
BMR job sizes cannot be manually configured. The plug-in will determine the necessary data to
capture for backup to be used for EVault System Restore. That said, it is recommended that you
exclude data files to help minimize the size of the BMR job. The BMR will ignore any exclusions of
data that it needs and note these files in the backup log. You would then create separate backups
for the data that was excluded.
Image Plug-in jobs will back up the entire drive that was selected. It is recommended that you
create separate backups for very large drives. For example, if you have 2 drives which are 2 TBs in
size, it is recommended that each drive be in its own backup.

Another exception are backups of Virtual Machines with our EVault vSphere Recovery Agent. Due
to the size of configured VMs, even a single VM could exceed the recommended limit for backup.

Affected Products:
• Carbonite Server Backup Agent for Windows, version 8.x
• Linux Agent, 8.x
• EVault vSphere Recovery Agent, version 8.40 and older