Best practices when you create recovery points for use with the Granular Restore Option

Last published : Sep 28, 2026
When creating a recovery point, you should use the following guidelines:
  • Select the option to back up your computer, not the option to back up selected files and folders.
  • When you select which drives to back up, make sure that you select all of the drives on the system.
  • When you select the type of recovery point to create, you should select Recovery Point Set instead of Independent Recovery Point. This selection makes subsequent recovery points much smaller.
    | Recovery point set (recommended) | Schedules a base recovery point with additional recovery points that contain only the incremental changes that were made to your computer since the previous recovery point. |
    | | Incremental recovery points are created faster than the base recovery point. They also use less storage space than an independent recovery point. |
    | | Note: You can only have one recovery point set defined for each drive. TheRecovery point setoption is not available if you have already assigned a selected drive to an existing backup and specifiedRecovery point setas the recovery point type. This option also is unavailable if you select an unmounted drive that cannot be part of a recovery point set. |
    | Independent recovery point | Creates a complete, independent copy of the drives that you select. This backup type typically requires more storage space, especially if you run the backup multiple times. |
  • The Exchange server does not need to be turned off for a backup to run successfully. However, you should schedule the backup at a time when the server is less busy (for example, after midnight).
    | Schedule | Lets you select the days and a start time for when the backup should run. |
    | Run more than once per day | Indicates that you can run the backup more than once a day to protect data that you edit or change frequently. |
    | Time between backups | Specifies the maximum time that should occur between backups. |
    | Number of times | Specifies the number of times per day that the backup should run. |
    | Automatically optimize | Lets you select how often optimization should occur to help manage the disk space that is used by your backup destination. |
    | Start a new recovery point set | Indicates how frequently a new recovery point set should be started. |
    | Custom | Lets you customize the start time, and the days of the week or month to run the backup. |
    | Event Triggers - General | Lets you select the type of events that automatically starts a backup. |
  • If you use mount points, make sure that you select them for backup.
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