Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Getting Started:
Database Essentials

Safeguarding your data

Resiliency is the ability to recover in the case of a disaster. The goal in a disaster is to appear to the outside world as if nothing has happened. In the case of a Web site, if a customer or potential customer cannot access your site, that customer might be lost forever. OpenEdge supports many features to improve availability of your database in the event of system failures, such as failover cluster support, and Fathom Replication, but the most basic element of a recovery strategy is a good backup and a solid restoration process.

This section will answer the basic questions regarding the creation of an effective recovery strategy and show you where to invest your time and energy to create a complete solution. It is referred to as focusing on a recovery strategy. You want to focus on recovering from various situations, and not merely on the process of backing up your system.

Many users tend to focus on the backing up activities and not on recovery. If you had a good backup of your database, but you neglected to back up your application code, you are in as much trouble as if you had failed to back up your database because there is no effective way to access your data.