ASA Database Administration Guide
Backup and Data Recovery
Designing backup procedures
Most backup schedules involve periodic full backups interspersed with incremental backups of the transaction log. There is no simple rule for deciding how often to make backups of your data. The frequency with which you make backups depends on the importance of your data, how often it changes, and other factors.
Most backup strategies involve occasional full backups, interspersed by several incremental backups. A common starting point for backups is to carry out a weekly full backup, with daily incremental backups of the transaction log. Both full and incremental backups can be carried out online (while the database is running) or offline, on the server side or the client side. Archive backups are always full backups.
The kinds of failure against which a backup schedule protects you depends not only on how often you make backups, but also on how you operate your database server.
For more information, see Configuring your database for data protection.
You should always keep more than one full backup. If you make a backup on top of a previous backup, a media failure in the middle of the backup leaves you with no backup at all. You should also keep some of your full backups offsite to protect against fire, flood, earthquake, theft, or vandalism.
You can use the event scheduling features of Adaptive Server Anywhere to perform online backups automatically at scheduled times.
For more information on scheduling operations such as backups, see Automating Tasks Using Schedules and Events.