An example of a DB Backup Strategy

Our SAP DB Backup strategy:

  • Full Online Backup on 00:00 from Tuesday to Saturday.
  • Redolog on 06:00 from Monday to Saturday
  • And Once a month full offline backup
Is this good enough or need improvement?

An example of a DB Strategy is as follows:-

  • Full online SAP backup every day at 20:00 (including weekends)
  • Full OS filesystem (minus SAP data) every weekday.
  • Continuous archive logging from 15:00 to 11:00 next day (weekdays) and 15:00 to 14:30 (weekends).
  • Archive log deletion at 14:45 every day.
  • We perform a parallel backup on 2 tapes using 3 x 5 DLT tape autoloaders using a 7 day rotating tape cycle. OS backup onto single DAT. 
  • The tapes are stored offsite and brought in every weekday. On Friday the Friday, 
  • Saturday and Sunday tapes are brought in.
The only problem I can see with the strategy is if the system crashes at 05:55 on Monday and needs a restore, you could lose a lot of data as you are missing backups on Sunday and Monday, and archive logs from Sunday. 

With this strategy if this happens you will be restoring the data from 00:00 Saturday and the logs from 06:00 Saturday. This means you could lose 48 hours worth of data.

Is your operation 24 x 7 or 24 x 5? If 24 x 5 it shouldn't be too bad unless you run weekly jobs over the weekend. 

Do you have single tape drives or multiple autoloaders?

Is there anyone there to change the tapes over the weekend?

My own personal suggestion would be to forget the offline backup as you do not really want to restore data which could be a month old so why bother shutting the system down every month to back it up. I would perform a daily online backup every 
possible day and continually archive the redo logs with a window for changing the tapes. If nobody is there over the weekend to change the tapes, run your archiving continually through the weekend i.e. start on Friday and finish on Monday.

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