Database backup strategies

You can backup your data at regular hourly, daily and weekly intervals, using three different backup methods - full, differential and incremental (transaction log) backups. With a backup strategy that enables these three backup types, you can restore databases to any hour of any specific day of the week.

There is another backup method called the cold backup. This type of backup requires that you stop the database and copy files manually. We do not support this backup method.

This suggested backup strategy is based on vigorous lab tests. You may choose any backup strategy which is acceptable to your organization.

  • Do not create overlapping schedules for backups since only one backup at a time can be executed. It is important maintain the order of the backups.

  • Start with a full backup of all databases.

  • Create a full backup for weekend nights.

  • Create a differential backup for every night of a working day.

  • Create a transaction log backup for every hour (exclude hours when full and differential backups are running).

  • Perform incremental backups of the BPmaindb database every 15 minutes. This is due to the highly sensitive data stored in this database.

  • Backup to a remote machine or use a local drive and copy the backup files to a remote server.

  • Save four full database backup generations. That is, save four weeks of full database backups.

  • If you save the last two full, six differential, and 24 incremental database backups so that they are stored on the network, you can restore any database to any hour of any day during the last week, or to the last full backup for the previous week.

If you are willing to lose some data and do not need to recover data up to the latest minute, you can perform full and differential backups only.

However, to be able to restore data as close as possible to a specific point in time due to error, ensure that incremental backups are also performed to collect the active transaction logs.