Backing Up and Restoring Data

You can make backups of a database, as described in Backing Up a Database, which backs up all of the forests in the database. You can also create backups of individual forests used by a database, as described in Making Backups of a Forest.

There are a number of key differences between database-level and forest-level backups. A database-level backup, by default, backs up all of the forests in the database to the specified directory. Each time a database backup is initiated, a new set of backup data is created in that directory. With a forest-level backup, each forest must be backed up to a separate directory. In addition, each incremental backup of a forest is added onto the previous backup data. A forest backup also has additional logic that checks to see if any of its stands have changed before overwriting the backup of the earlier stand. Only the stands that have changed are overwritten.

Along with full backups, you can use incremental backups and journal archiving to create backups that enable you to recover your database to a specific point in time. For details, see Backing Up and Restoring a Database.

You can restore an entire database from a database backup, as described in Restoring a Database without Journal Archiving. You can restore an individual forest from either a database backup, as described in Restoring a Database without Journal Archiving, or from an individual forest backup, as described in Restoring a Forest.