Schedules for Backups

Typically, a backup uses a combination of full and incremental backups. The frequency with which you make backups depends on such factors as the importance of your data and how often it changes.

A common starting point for backups is to perform a weekly full backup, with daily incremental backups of the transaction log. Both full and incremental backups can be performed online (while the database is running) or offline, on the server side or the client side.

The kinds of failure against which a backup schedule provides protection is dependent on not only the frequency of your backup schedule, but also on how you operate your database server.

Keep more than one full backup. You should also keep some of your full backups off site to protect against fire, flood, earthquake, theft, or vandalism.

You can use the event scheduling features to perform online backups automatically at scheduled times.