The ckpdb utility can be used to take the backup, and rollforwarddb to restore and recover the database.

The initial backup has to be a full backup with no outstanding transactions. To take live incremental backups after the initial backup you must turn on journaling. Upon restore you can replay incremental backups to get back to the most recent incremental backup. You can take up to 99 incremental backups following a full backup but of course the database restore and recovery takes longer as more incremental backups have to be applied. You should plan to periodically take a full backup to reset the counter for incremental backups.

For information on how to use the ckpdb and rollforwarddb utilities, see the Vector User Guide.

The backup file is not compressed by default but you can pipe the output into a compression utility to compress the backup file.