Here is some general guidance on backup and restore practices.

In general, backup frequency depends upon how much provisioning activity you are undertaking and the details of your Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your customer.

The 50 million-plus transactions per week in the Microsoft Network (MSN) justifies shadowing or log shipping, where Microsoft SQL Server 2005 tools are used to duplicate transactions in a warm standby database. Less aggressive operations may be served by full weekly backups with intervening incremental backups.

In the solution, there are key data stores that your business cannot function without. Much of the information that is lost can be restored from existing data; however, customer service information in the PlanManager and ResourceManager databases must be preserved and should be backed up hourly, or perhaps log shipped in a particularly active environment.

Placing backup files on disks used by data and logs is not recommended. If you are performing backups on either data or log disks, you affect performance of the live databases. This affect on performance is multiplied by the number of data or log files sharing the same physical disk. You also need to consider the physical storage requirements for backups. Do you have enough disk space for your backups? Will you be using tape drives? On shared severs, backup may be a service you provide to your customers at extra cost.