I have a SQL Server located in a colo center. Currently, our database is about 100Gb. Log files average about 500Mb/day, and differential backups grow by a bit less than that.
My current disaster recovery plan is: have a full backup elsewhere, take log backups every ten minutes, diffs every night. I copy the logs and diffs off to S3, so, except for the tail, they're not on the machine in case it goes completely tits up.
I can restore the full backup elsewhere, and I check occasionally to make sure I can restore the entire log chain. Usually, I'd just restore "full -> latest diffs -> logs after diff", but I do run the full set occasionally, just to make sure I can.
My question is, how often do people actually do the full backup? I can't see it being worthwhile to try and jam 100Gb into S3 every day. I'm not even sure I'd do it every week. Is there a "best practices" for this, or does it all just boil down to my own ability/desire to buy bandwidth/storage, vs. a longer recovery time if I have to apply days (or weeks) of logs.
I guess the real risk is that some log file in the chain gets corrupted, and then I'm totally screwed.