It is very interesting watching all of the comments on this very emotive
topic.

The answer to the question 'are you taking monthly backups?' is always
'Yes - of course I am'.  Monthly backup is a logical thing, not a physical
thing - does the user need to know the difference?  You could even follow up
with 'In fact we take full backups for every day' - but this may be too much
information and again lead to long explanations.

The question from the user stems from lack of trust that you are able to
deliver his data in the event of a problem, so in his case a little
knowledge is a dangerous thing! (must have monthly backups!) .  This is not
resolved overnight but as long as your procedures enable full and timely
recovery to any threat to data integrity and availability then you will
cover yourself more than by just producing the mandatory monthly. This has
everything to do with ensuring best practice is implemented.

What the customer wants to hear is 'Yes your data is protected and your SLAs
for data recovery will be met.'   If an SLA is not in place, then this is
the way to proceed and a good way to establish trust.

Try it - you do not need to explain progressive incremental or anything like
that, how the job is done is your business, if it isn't, then why is a
professional team employed to do 'backups'  - elevate the discussion to the
business level and have the processes in place to back it up, i.e be able to
recover the data no matter what happens in accordance with agreed SLAs.
This is much better investment of $s than in useless
Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly/Yearly cyclic processing.

Regards
Philip Vandenberg
Karyfi Consulting
www.karyfi.com