What Is Backup Frequency?

This is the amount of time a backup program waits between backups, such as every hour or every day

By
Tim Fisher
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Tim Fisher
Senior Vice President & Group General Manager, Tech & Sustainability
  • Emporia State University
Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the SVP and General Manager of Lifewire.
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Updated on March 6, 2023

Backup frequency means exactly that: how often the backup occurs.

When you define a backup tool's backup frequency, you're setting a schedule for how often data should be backed up.

Most online backup services and local/offline backup tools support customizing the backup frequency, sometimes in simple ways, but other times in advanced ones.

What Backup Frequencies Are Typically Available?

All backup software programs support a backup frequency, but some may be more useful or customizable than others.

Some common backup frequencies you'll see offered include continuous, once per minute, every x minutes (e.g. every 15 minutes), hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and manually.

Backup schedule type for EaseUS Todo Backup Free
EaseUS Todo Backup Free.

Continuous backup means the software is constantly backing up your data. This usually means literally all the time (immediately after every change to a file) but could mean a frequency of less than once per minute.

The other options, like once per minute or daily, can be considered more of a schedule because files will be backed up during that time only.

A manual backup frequency is just like it sounds: until you manually start it, no files will be backed up. This is basically the opposite of a continuous backup.

Some backup programs have additional options, like enabling the schedule to take place within a specific time frame only.

For example, a backup frequency may be set to 11:00 PM through 5:00 AM, meaning that the backup process would only occur during that time and any remaining files that need to be backed up at 5:00 AM would have to wait until later that night at 11:00 PM to resume.

If the backup software supports backup sets, you can usually set a different backup frequency for each set. That way, your movies can be backed up manually, for example, but your documents can be backed up continuously.

What's the Best Backup Frequency for Online Backup?

Using an online backup service that supports a particular backup frequency may be a deciding factor when choosing which one to subscribe to.

Because continuous backup runs all the time and doesn't need to wait a week or month to start, choosing a backup service that supports continuous backup is almost always the way to go.

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