Nowadays, most business processes, if not all, are automated. Activities of a company, from sales to management decisions, generally require an application to access a database server and to read or modify records. If data loss occurs, some of the company's normal activities become impossible to continue until the data is restored. If some data is lost forever, the company probably loses some of its opportunities and some of its vital information. In a sense, we can safely state that each relevant data loss diminishes the value of a company. For this reason, such an event is commonly called a disaster. In technical jargon, the task of restoring as much data as possible is called disaster recovering. Since it is not always possible to repair data files, it is necessary to make regular backups of data so that they can be restored after a disaster. This chapter discusses backup and disaster recovering, some of the most vital tasks of a DBA.

The main topics...