Use the Rate of Change page of the Backup Database SmartGuide to indicate how much your database changes each day. This determines how often your database should be backed-up.
If you are using circular logging, the database backup represents the last version of the database you can restore. This means that the time between backups represents the amount of work that you may lose permanently. For example, if you backup your database once a week every Friday at midnight, you could lose an entire week of transactions if your database fails on Friday at 11:59PM. So the more often you backup, the safer your database becomes. Of course this is only possible if you can schedule an offline backup more often than once a week.
If you are using archive logging, you can restore the database to the last complete transaction. However, the longer the time between backups the longer it may take to roll-forward the logged changes. If our previous example was for a system with archive logging turned on, and the database failed at 11:59PM, you would have to roll-forward an entire week's worth of transactions. You would be able to recover all your data, but recovery could take a long time.
So deciding when to schedule a backup is a trade off between the time it takes to backup the database and the amount of data you can recover (circular logging) or the backup time and the time required to recover all the data (archive logging) after a failure.
Fields and controls
Related information