There are several important rules you must follow when you are restoring an incremental backup:

  • If you are restoring over an existing database, verify your backup before executing the restore. If the existing database is the only copy, back up the existing database first.
  • Restore a backup with the same OpenEdge release that you used to perform the backup. In most cases, you can restore a backup with any minor release within the same major release, with the following exceptions:
    • If you enabled a feature, you cannot restore your database to a release that does not support that feature, without first disabling the feature from your database. For example, if your database has Change Data Capture enabled, you cannot restore a backup of that database to an OpenEdge release that does not support Change Data Capture. Be aware that New VST tables are enabled by default and are a feature under this restriction. Use PROUTIL DESCRIBE to list the features enabled for your database.
    • For online backup ONLY, if you do not specify bibackup all, online backup is not backward compatible to releases prior to OpenEdge Release 11.3.0. The bibackup qualifier indicates whether to backup the active BI clusters or all the BI clusters. By default, only the active clusters are backed up.
  • You must restore an incremental database backup to an existing database.
  • Create a void database before you restore the backup, or else use the existing structure, overwriting it.
  • You must restore a database in the same order that you backed it up. For example, you must first restore the full backup, followed by the first incremental backup, followed by the second incremental backup, etc. If you try to restore a database out of sequence, you get an error message and the restore operation fails.
  • If you lose the second incremental and you used an overlap factor of 1, the third incremental correctly restores the data lost in the second incremental.
  • After you restore a full backup, do not use the database if you want to restore successive incremental backups. If you make any database changes before completely restoring all backups, any successive, incremental backups (that were not restored) are rejected unless you restart the restore procedure beginning with the full backup.
  • If a system failure occurs while you are restoring the database, restart the restore operation beginning with the backup volume that you were restoring at the time of the system failure.
  • If a target database exists, it must have the same block size and storage area configuration as the source database. The PROREST utility attempts to expand storage areas to allow a complete restore, but if the storage areas cannot expand, the restore fails.