What are the different considerations while planning a database backup strategy?

Answer 1

1. What data should be backed up regularly?
2. When should the data be backup regularly?
3. How much time to you have if you have to recover from a crash?

Terms to Know:
Full Backup
Differential Backup
Incremental Backup

Usually you do a full backup at the first of every month and then a differential backup every night.

An incremental backup will take you more time but saves on disk space.

These are things that I considered when backing up data.

Answer 2

Note that backing up a database is often quite different than backing up a regular file - because often databases run 24x7 or close to it. Backing up *any* file that's being actively modified while the backup is running is bad juju, but it's particularly bad for databases. It's easy to create a backup that seems to be just fine, but when restored results in a corrupted database.

Things you can do to minimize the problem:

1) Quiesce the database while the backup is running. This way, the file isn't being modified while the backup runs. However, if it's a production database, you may not want the database to be down for the several hours it can take to back up a several hundred gigabyte database,

2) Buy a high-end storage subsystem that supports a "snap copy" replication scheme - then the database only needs to be quiesced for a few seconds while a snapshot is initiated. It then completes the copy in the background, and you can back up the copy at your leisure (if the replicated copy is at another site over an extended fiberchannel link, this could be the backup itself). This however gets *very* expensive -, especially if you have a hundred terabytes or so to back up.

3) Most of the enterprise-scale backup systems (Tivoli, Legato, etc) have special plugins for database systems like Oracle, that understand the innards of an Oracle database and do special magic to make sure that what gets backed up is a consistent database that isn't corrupt. However, this software isn't cheap either....

Answer 3

Norton, among others are working on an intergrated security suite.

For the moment, you might wan't to consider Norton Save and Restore, and Registry mechanic. I have both on disk so I don't have them loaded. I use them as needed. When my system was most healthy I used Save and Restore to create a safe restore point, which I saved to disk.

Reg Mechanic is my in case software.

Be cautious in running multiple firewalls, they can conflict and when they do they can cancel each other out.

Read Tech publications online, and get advice from experts.

TechRepublic.com
PCMag.com
PCWorld.com are all excellent.


Save and restore will help you back up your system, Registry Mechanic may solve registry problems.