Backup Strategies

Backing up a database, no matter how large or small, should form part of your database solution. Even if a backup is taken only once a week or even once a month, it is crucial that you sit down and decide which backup strategy is right for you. Much of this decision lies in the hands of the system and business owners for your company, since they must weigh the risk they’re willing to take against the cost of minimizing that risk. Many different strategies can be adopted within your overall main backup strategy, depending on days of the week or perhaps a period within the month. In this section of the chapter, I will cover areas of backups to help the correct decision to be made.

Recovery Models

When backing up a database, the information that is backed up is partially decided by the recovery model of the database as well as what type of database backup is being performed. In this section, I discuss these models, but you may find you return to this section once you have looked at the exercises within this chapter as well as after discussing transactions in Chapter 9. It is necessary to discuss models at this point, as they are something you need to be aware of for the rest of the chapter.