Best Practices › Effective Backup and Recovery Strategies

Effective Backup and Recovery Strategies

Plan your backup and recovery strategies for a database before you create the database, and maintain a regular backup schedule to ensure smooth recovery in case of database or media failure. If such planning is not considered before database creation, database recovery may not be possible in certain cases.

For more information about disaster recovery planning, see the "Disaster Recovery" appendix.

When you develop your backup and recovery strategy, consider the following:

• Full backups—Full database backups should be performed regularly; it is easier to recover a database from a full backup.
• Tablespace-level backups—Recoverable databases allow tablespace-level backups, which can be done online or offline. For an isolated application error, it is easier to restore from a tablespace-level backup image.
• Online or offline backups—Offline backups are usually faster, but require exclusive access to the database. Online backups reduce the database downtime; however, they allow other connections to the database while the backup is taking place.
• Performance tuning—You can improve performance of backup and restore operations by tuning your SAP R/3 parameters.

  For more information about tuning SAP R/3 parameters for performance, see your SAP R/3 documentation.