A database backup enables you to go back and restore a database to a point in time. Doing so protects you from data issues and/or corruptions that you may have had since the last backup. In addition, you can restore the database on different hardware in case the current hardware has undergone a complete and unrecoverable system crash. A database restore will cause an outage that will take time to perform, how long depending on the data size and speed of your system.

The design of your backup strategy starts with an analysis of the risk of an outage and the amount of time you can afford the system to be unavailable. In addition, consider the cost of the backup solution itself.

Vector supports live, incremental backups if you enable journaling on the first full read-only backup. The backup is always a database-level backup.

The following sections describe various backup strategies. In some cases it makes sense to use a combination of these approaches for optimum high availability.