In case of media failure, such as a disk crash, you can restore your databases if—and only if—you have regular backups of the databases and their transaction logs. Full recovery depends on the regular use of the dump database and dump transaction commands to back up databases and the load database and load transaction commands to restore them. These commands are described briefly below and more fully in Chapter 13, “Backing Up and Restoring User Databases,” and Chapter 14, “Restoring the System Databases.”
WARNING! Never use operating system copy commands to copy an operating database device. Running Adaptive Server against a copied device may cause database corruption. Either shutdown Adaptive Server, or use the quiesce database command to protect copy operations.
The dump commands can complete successfully even if your database is corrupt. Before you back up a database, use the dbcc commands to check its consistency. See Chapter 11, “Checking Database Consistency.”
WARNING! If you dump directly to tape, do not store any other types of files (UNIX backups, tar files, and so on) on that tape. Doing so can invalidate the Sybase dump files. However, if you dump to a UNIX file system, you can then archive the resulting files to a tape.
