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Database Recovery Strategies


Be it a natural disaster striking your primary data center and obliterating all your databases or some technical error that brings it down, forcing you to consider moving your database to your backup DR (disaster recovery) location, the right disaster recovery strategy would definitely save the day.

Tejas Jain - Database

How do we accomplish this?

Well, there are primarily three strategies, you can considering, depending upon your downtime tolerance level:

  • Electronic Vaulting
  • Remote Journaling
  • Remote Mirroring

Let us see what each one of them has in store for us:

Electronic Vaulting

  • These are essentially bulk transfers wherein the database backups are moved from the primary site to the remote (backup / DR) site via network
  • There is a significant delay between the time you declare a disaster and the time to recover your database backups
  • Entire Backup files are transferred
  • Not suited for hot sites where the recovery should be instantaneous

Remote Journaling

  • These are much more frequent and faster than Electronic Vaulting
  • Though these are bulk transfers as well, they are usually carried out every hour or sometimes more frequently
  • Entire backup files are not transferred every single time.. Rather, only the differential backup (i.e. the transaction logs which were generated due to live transactions post previous full backup) are transferred, making this mechanism quite fast.
  • Since the live transaction logs are not synced, there is still human intervention required to bring up the database at the backup location
  • Usually more expensive than Electronic Vaulting due to higher frequency

Remote Mirroring

  • The word "mirroring" should explain that this is the "real-time" replication
  • There is a live database server at the backup / DR location which continuously syncs up with the primary database such that should your original database goes down the backup database is fully ready to immediately take over
  • Most expensive as the underlying infrastructure, processing overhead and the personnel costs are significant





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