It is recommended that you develop and implement a backup schedule to protect your data. You should also ensure that you have created and tested your backup and recovery commands as part of your backup and recovery plan.

Some of the factors that you need to consider when developing your backup and recovery plan include:

Some of the most common situations where you require a backup include:

• failed media
• failed hardware
• file corruption

Typically, a backup uses a combination of full and incremental backups. The frequency of each backup type depends on the type of data that you are protecting. You should also validate your backups to ensure that they can be used for recovery. See Validating backups.

You can use the scheduling features in SQL Anywhere to automate the task of backing up your database. Once you specify a schedule, the backups are performed automatically by the database server. See Automating tasks using schedules and events and Creating a maintenance plan.

The length of time your organization can function without access to the data in your database determines the maximum recovery time.

You should verify that you have the protection you need against media failure on the database file and on the transaction log file. If you are running in a replication environment, you should consider using a transaction log mirror. See Protecting against media failure.

External factors such as available hardware, the size of database files, recovery medium, disk space, and unexpected errors can affect your recovery time. When planning a backup strategy, you should allow additional recovery time for tasks such as entering recovery commands or retrieving and loading tapes.

 See also