The decay can be gradual, and therefore may not be noticed when administrators are focused on the day-to-day operational aspects of backup, particularly when lacking comprehensive backup reporting to measure trending. As a result, small problems can go unnoticed until they become large. For this reason, it is important to develop a regular routine -- a backup health calendar -- to check various aspects of the backup environment's health at appropriate intervals -- daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually.
Here are a few examples of each:
Daily
-- Review successful and unsuccessful backups.
-- Resolve failures before the next backup window.