Keepit schedules 2 backups every day. However, the actual number of jobs may vary for each customer as several factors impact the frequency, such as:
- Different stages of a backup
A backup has an initial stage and an incremental stage. The initial backup takes longer and can last for several days or even weeks. This means there is usually one backup job over the whole period of onboarding. Incremental backups tend to run as defined by the environment configuration as only the changes made to the data will be actually backed up during this stage.
- The duration of a backup job
If the duration of a backup job lasts for an extended period of time, there may be fewer backup jobs for that specific connector. Since 2 backup jobs are scheduled per day, on average each job should take no more than 12 hours. However, if the backup jobs lasts longer, then there will be fewer backup jobs that specific day.
- Changes made to the connector's configuration
After the onboarding stage is over, the customer may decide to add a new type of data to the connector. This will mean that the backup must again go through the initial stage for that data type. The previously selected data types will continue to be backed up incrementally, but the overall duration of the backup will change.
- External factors
Different external factors that Keepit has little or no influence on can impact the backup performance. Among these factors are: throttling, cloud service maintenance work, errors on the side of the cloud service provider, migration of customer's data, the customer's setup and data. The most common of these factors is throttling. Although we continuously make improvements to combat throttling, sometimes throttling can be so severe that the backup job fails at the very start. Otherwise, throttling causes the backup job to take longer than usual, because in following the best practices of a cloud service provider, Keepit allocates a certain number of retries to finally process the data.
- Changes made to the data in the cloud
Even if the customer has selected all data types to be backed up, some data might still be in the migration process. This means that whenever a new job starts, there can be a lot of new data to be backed up even though the initial backup stage is over.
- Data added to the backup
Every customer has different data to be secured. Some customers have a lot of Exchange data, others may have more SharePoint data. While there are some mechanisms that can improve the backup performance of Exchange data, there is no way for Keepit to influence certain external factors that may slow down the backup. Also, the number of files and their sizes can impact the job: the more small items that are present in the customer's tenant, the longer the backup job can take because Keepit needs to process each file separately. In this case, the backup speed may seem to be slower than expected, even though the number of files secured will be increasing quickly.