Actian Vector offers several utilities to backup databases. These are fully described in the Actian Vector User Guide.

A database backup enables you to go back and restore a database to a point in time. Doing so protects you from data issues or corruptions that may have occurred since the last backup. In addition, you can restore the database to 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 depends on the data size and speed of your system. For more information, see Backup and Restore in the Vector Deployment Guide.

You can back up to AWS EFS by creating the II_CHECKPOINT, II_JOURNAL, and II_DUMP LOCATIONS there.

For high availability (HA), the best protection against a variety of both planned and unplanned outages is the use of a duplicate standby configuration. Ideally, the standby configuration should be located in a different AWS availability zone from your primary zone to protect against disasters such as flooding, earthquakes, and wide-spread power or broad network outages.

The best way to implement a “hot” standby configuration of an analytics database in the cloud is simply to duplicate your primary system ETL to the standby system. Instead of having one job to load analytics data, you would either have two separate jobs (one for primary, one for secondary), or one job that branches to two separate targets. If you are using a replication tool, such as Attunity or HVR, to load the primary Vector, you could simply add another replication target to the standby system. If you are using bespoke applications to applications to load the database, these would need to be customized to be duplicated or branched.

In lieu of a hot standby configuration, if time allows, you can rollforward backups and journaling to recreate a system.