I was wondering how often does one choose to make and keep back ups. I know that “It depends on your business needs”, but that is rather vague and unsatisfying, so I was hoping to hear some heuristics from the community. Like say I had a workstation/desktop that is acting as a server at a shop (taking inventory / sales receipts) and would be using something like timeshift to keep snapshots. I feel like keeping two daily and a weekly would be alright for a store, since the two most recent would not be too old or something. I also feel like using the hourly snapshots would be too taxing on a CPU and might be using to much disk space.
How often depends on how much work it is to recreate, or the consequences of loosing data.
Some systems do not have real data locally, get a backup every week. Most get a nightly backup. Some with a high rate of change , get a lunch/middle of the workday run.
Some have hourly backups/snapshots, where recreating data is impossible. CriticL databases have hourly + transaction log streaming offsite.How long to keep a history depends on how likely an error can go unnoticed but minimum 14 days. Most have 10 dailes + 5 weeky + 6 monthly + 1 yearly.
If you have paper recipes and can recreate data lost easily. Daily seems fine.