A necessary part of ensuring your business’s continuity is the ability to restore your databases from backups. Unfortunately however, it’s not uncommon for IT administrators to do the bare minimum required in terms of backup, and not consider important factors such as viability, integrity, reliability and security.

While the topic of database backups might seem difficult from the first glance, it’s really more about the specific database type that you’ll have to work with. While smaller companies tend to delegate their backup management responsibilities to someone with other jobs in the company, a lot of larger companies tend to employ a specific, dedicated person for all of their database backup management matters. This person’s position is often called “database administrator” (or DBA).

Database administrators have a number of responsibilities, but one of the biggest ones is to be ready for the possibility of any kind of failure that might cause a data loss, be it media failure, hardware failure or software failure. Recovering databases whenever needed is therefore likely to be one of their responsibilities. Two of the most important points related to the backups in the context of anything happening is their integrity and the time period that it will take to restore backups.

In general,  backup solutions can be separated into two categories: solutions that  work with as many different data sources as possible, and solutions that focus only on a specific number of database types and work with those only. Bacula is a participant of the first group, offering compatibility with an especially wide range of  different backup targets, including SQL databases.

In working to prevent data loss and failures from happening or at least attempt to mitigate their consequences, it is not uncommon for database administrators to employ various methods and techniques, including:

• Creating disaster recovery plans.
• Improving the overall effectiveness of backup management operations.
• Testing database backups regularly.
• Developing detailed backup plans.
• Updating their knowledge about database backups, OS backups, and so on.

The points above are fairly standard. However, there are a lot of different database types and each of them has their own software list, feature list, and even some specific details that might not be present in other backup types. In this article we  describe three of the popular database types: MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL.