To ensure the safety of your data, you have to back it up to backup media at regular intervals. You need to formulate a backup and maintenance strategy that is appropriate to your needs. If the database system crashes, then you can import the data saved on the backup media and restore the database instance.
The database system performs savepoints at regular intervals. All in the cache is written to the hard disk. However, this does not protect you from data loss that can occur, for example, if the hard disk crashes.
To speed up the backup process, complete and incremental data backups on several backup media can be written in parallel. During recovery, you can also import data from several backup media in parallel into the database system. The number of parallel backup media that can be used during the recovery does not depend on the parallel backup media that were used to create the backup. Even a backup to a single medium with succeeding media can be imported again in parallel.
Use the MAX_BACKUP_DEVS parameter to define the maximum number of backup media that can be imported in parallel. You can considerably reduce the recovery times by using up to 32 tape drives.
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1. You create data and log backups at regular intervals during normal database operation according to your backup and maintenance strategy. Each backup is given a unique backup ID automatically by the database system.
¡ Database Manager GUI: Backing Up Data
¡ Database Manager CLI, Commands for Backing Up and Archiving
You can also use external backup tools.
Data that has been unloaded using the Loader database tool is no backup. Unloaded data may not be consistent and is not suitable for restoring a database instance.
2. If an error occurs, use the data and log backups to restore the database instance.
¡ Database Manager GUI: Restoring Data
¡ Database Manager CLI, Commands for Restoring
See also:
Creating an Homogenous System Copy