As the need for system availability increases, especially in 24-hour operations, it becomes increasingly difficult to put a system in a non-active state in order to perform a backup. This is particulary problematic when performing backups of databases because the “live data” is typically relational and must be kept in sync. Problems can emerge when you perform a restore because some of the data can be erroneous or partially-updated. While you can quiesce the database during the backup so that no transactions are processed, this does make the database or application unavailable to users.

SBAdmin includes the option to perform a snapshot backup which will backup the data at a consistent point-in-time and make it unnecessary to quiesce the database or application. By performing snapshot backups, users may continue to access and modify “live data” in the online copy, while the backup includes all data as it was when the backup process started. This ensures the relational data, when restored, is all at the same point-in-time, no matter how long the backup takes.