Checking Your Backups
Manually verify that your backups are working, including full backup files (.bak) and Transaction Log backup files (.trn).
Backup Files
You can verify that the jobs actually write backups. Launch Windows Explorer and go to the backup path you noted. Open the MinistryPlatform folder (unless you write all backups to the root directory, which is not common). In the MinistryPlatform folder, you should see two types of files.
Full backup files have a .bak extension, and Transaction Log backup files have a .trn extension. If you don't see .bak or .trn files, the backup portion of the task is not working.
Full Backups (bak)
You should see a .bak file for each day going back to the maximum file age.
Transaction Log Backups (trn)
You should see multiple .trn files for each day going back to the maximum file age. If you see files older than the maximum file age, the Maintenance Cleanup task is not working.
How Long Should I Keep Backups?
- How large is the drive where you will write local backups?
- How large is the media you use for off-server backups (tape, iSCSI, cloud, and so on)?
- How large are your databases?
- Are you using backup compression in SQL?
- Do you have a large number of transactions hitting your database?
The default Maintenance Cleanup tasks configured during MinistryPlatform deployment retain two weeks of backups, both full and Transaction Log. A two-week retention is generally a safe policy, meaning it gives the average organization enough backup history on-server to handle restore needs for most situations and doesn't take so much space that it fills up the drive. Under the right circumstances, you can store significantly more backup files on your server without negatively affecting your applications.