A recovery plan documents how you will recover your system if it fails. When developing a recovery plan, you must consider every potential failure, from short-term power outages and disk failures to environmental disasters such as earthquakes.

To develop a database recovery plan, you first need to determine the availability requirements for the database application. Consider the following questions:

  • How many transactions can you afford to lose?
  • How long can the application be offline while you perform scheduled maintenance, such as backups?
  • If the system or database becomes unavailable, how much time can you spend recovering?
  • If you use transactions that affect more than one database, can you allow transactions to occur inconsistently in those databases?
  • How will you test your recovery plan?

Use the tables in the following sections to develop a recovery plan. These tables provide a range of answers to these questions, and also provide backup and recovery suggestions for each.