ABOUT AVAILABILITY, BACKUP & RECOVERY


What's a good backup ? Just a good procedure of recovery. The only sense of a backup is the potential recovery.
What's a good recovery? Complete & reliable, fast & easy, point-in-time recovery.


The methods depend on the resources (humans, budget & technology) and on the level of availability needed.

But in all cases, you need to perform an entire analyze of all potential lost of information.


For a database server, this include also the hardware, the O.S and the hosting site and his infrastructure
(Electrical & magnetic stability, security measures) in order to prevent a maximum of catastrophically cases
(Rob, fire, flood, earthquake,..). And the specificities of database server as restoring just one table...


This analyze will lead you to conclude that cold backup are essentials in a global recovery strategy and if possible spend across multiple site.


This is not only for the database purpose but essentially for the OS and the database engine.

In fact, with current technologies is often faster to rebuild completely a server or a part of it by restoring a backup than other means.

Even if the other methods are absolutely useful to finalize the cold recovery or to perform particular recovery (As point-in-time).

So my philosophy is that we have to use at least 4 methods (Cold bkp, export, archive & RAID).
If possible, a 5° method, global redundancy with clustering, replication, standby,...


DEGAND XAVIER

DX SPRL

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM


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