Typically, a backup uses a combination of full and incremental backups. The frequency with which you make backups depends on such factors as the importance of your data and how often it changes.

A common starting point for backups is to perform a weekly full backup, with daily incremental backups of the transaction log. Both full and incremental backups can be performed online (while the database is running) or offline, on the server side or the client side.

The kinds of failure against which a backup schedule provides protection is dependent not only the frequency of your backup schedule, but also on how you operate your database server.

You should always keep more than one full backup. If you make a backup on top of a previous backup, a media failure in the middle of the backup leaves you with no backup at all. You should also keep some of your full backups offsite to protect against fire, flood, earthquake, theft, or vandalism.

You can use the event scheduling features of SQL Anywhere to perform online backups automatically at scheduled times. See Creating a maintenance plan.