SAP Backup/Recovery Planning
In order to protect your SAP systems, it is recommended that full and transactional backups be created regularly and kept separate from the system hardware, preferably in a remote location.
Full Backups
A full backup contains the entirety of the database at a given point in time. In the event of a hardware failure or data corruption, it is necessary to have a full backup of the database to restore. The main benefit of having a full backup available for restore is obvious: your company does not have to lose critical business data in the event of a failure. It is recommended that a full backup be taken at least once daily.
Transactional Backups
Full backups alone are not sufficient for most businesses. If a failure occurs just before or during a full backup, then data created or altered since the prior backup will be lost. Transactional backups are designed to save the changes made to a database after full backups are taken, that way those changes are protected. If your backups are setup to run daily at 12:00 AM, and you have transactional backups every hour, then if a failure occurs at 11:59 PM, you potentially would only lose 59 minutes worth of productive changes. Depending on your business requirements, transactional backups can be taken as frequently as you need. It is recommended that transactional backups be taken every 15 minutes for a production system.
Multiple Points of Failure
Taking full and transactional backups, however, does not mean that your data is sufficiently protected. If your backups are stored on the same physical device that houses the database, they can be subject to the same hardware failure that can corrupt or destroy the database. If your backups are on the same array as the data, and the array is lost, then you have lost both your live data and your backups, making your data unrecoverable. If your backups are on a different array, but still attached to the same server as the database, a server loss will potentially make your system unrecoverable. This is where the concept of multiple points of failure comes into play. You do not want any single event to be able to make your SAP system unrecoverable. The ideal scenario is for your database backups (both full and transactional) to be written to tape and taken to a secure remote location so that the live data and the backups are less likely to be destroyed in a single event, like a power surge or even acts of nature such as a flood or tornado.
Recovery Planning
No matter how extensive your backup scenario is, it is useless if there is not a recovery plan in place. Your company needs to have a recovery plan in place and periodic recovery tests need to be performed so that documentation is kept updated and the validity of the backup/recovery scenario is verified. It is recommended that recovery scenarios be tested and updated at least once annually.
Hope this helps...
