A systems administrator is configuring the backup plan for a high-transaction online order processing database server. The business continuity plan specifies a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. The administrator needs to select a backup frequency that meets this RPO without causing significant performance degradation on the production server. Which of the following backup strategies is MOST appropriate?
Daily full backups at midnight.
Incremental backups every 15 minutes, with a daily full backup.
Hourly differential backups, with a weekly full backup.
The correct answer is to perform incremental backups every 15 minutes combined with daily full backups. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured in time. Since the RPO is 15 minutes, backups must occur at least that frequently to ensure no more than 15 minutes of data is lost. Incremental backups are ideal for this scenario because they only copy data that has changed since the last backup, making them fast and requiring minimal storage and performance overhead. Combining frequent incremental backups with a daily or weekly full backup provides a complete and efficient strategy that meets a tight RPO while balancing resource use.
Performing daily full backups would result in an RPO of up to 24 hours, which does not meet the 15-minute requirement.
Performing full backups every 15 minutes would meet the RPO but would consume excessive storage and server resources, likely causing significant performance degradation on the high-transaction database.
Performing hourly differential backups would result in an RPO of up to one hour, which fails to meet the stringent 15-minute requirement set by the business.