In the digital age, where everything is in digital format, preservation of such data becomes extremely important. You never know when the system failure occurs. There might be various reasons for system failure such as hardware failures, human error, network intrusions or network catastrophes.
A disaster management and planning has to be chosen and strictly executed. For mission critical companies, the backup tends to be very helpful for recovery. After all, any loss of the database is the loss of the business. Below are some of the situations wherein you will realize the importance of having your backup – a backup that is working and can be used for restoration.
Recovering from Corruption
The backup plays a vital role in getting the database recovered from corruption. The database gets corrupted due to various reasons.
- File backups: If there is some system outage or someone has deleted some critical data or dropped the tables, it makes the system unstable and non-working. Thanks to the backup software tools available to get it restored and up the system immediately with minimum loss of the data.
- Drive space: The shortage of space in your hard-disk can happen anytime when you have large size of data piling up in form of appended backups. The backup might fail as it does not have enough space on the hard-disk.
- Transaction log full: Because of insufficient space in the log file, the transaction cannot complete. You will get alert of transaction log full for which you will have to create a backup point and have few logs cleared. You will be able to run queries, but you won’t be able to modify the database.
- Slow running backups: While you are taking backup there might be instances wherein your backup process takes very long time or sometimes it might get to standstill. Because either too slow process or frequent force full killing of the process, there are chances of backup getting corrupted.
- Differential backups: You might be having the differential backup and is working fine. But during an uncertain outage you start the procedure to restore a differential backup, but you get an error which makes it impossible to roll the process backward. You are in a fix and here’s where a full backup is required.
Disaster Recovery Plans
In an emergency, you will always require proper disaster recovery plan that works well. There are various tools available that can ease the task of backup and help you focus on things that are more critical. Proper disaster recovery plans not only include having frequent backup but they should be checked by restoring it.
Integrity of the Backups
Besides having the backup plan, there should be integrity test of the backup and it should be well-planned. A database checkpoint should be forcefully implemented in order to check the integrity of the backups. A detailed documentation and sequence of the database backup should be recorded. The necessary patch files when the database is upgraded should be noted.
Thus, there are many common problems that directly or indirectly affect your system administration and backup, which in turn affects your overall business. Proper implementation of the backup system is quite essential to avoid future problems.
