Doubt

[Mike]

what is the different between online full backup and offline full backup. Is that any change in transactions?

which is best way to take backup year end is it online or offline backup?

Is both are same>???

with regards
Shane

 

[Cringer]

If you go into technical details then yes there is a difference between the two. In terms of the practicalities in terms of making sure you have a working backup then there is no difference. The only major difference is that the database stays alive while you back it up online and the users can use it as before. Removing downtime is usually a massive plus.

 

[Cringer]

Oh, in terms of transactions, the online backup will include transactional information - it has to. This is held within the BI that is backed up. When you first start the database after the restore then normal disaster recovery will be performed to sort out the transactions that were in flight at the time of the backup, so integrity is maintained.

 

[tamhas]

I.e., the online backup will be as of the instant the backup is started and activity will be frozen while the BI is backed up.

An online backup allows you to keep users running, even though there may be some performance hit. An offline backup allows you to complete the backup process faster. E.g., many years ago I had a customer that wanted to do on-line backups so that they could start an overnight job queue and go home. But, as the business grew, the time to do the online backup and the time to process the overnight job queue, which was slowed by that backup, got so long that the overnight queue was not done by the time the east coast warehouse started work. They found that they could do an offline backup and then start the job queue and the whole thing got done much faster. Of course, we had fewer squirrels in the server back then.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

The answers to these questions and many more can be found in the Database Essentials manual in the documentation set.

 

[mollyfud]

One thing to add, after years involved in support, is that to have the most reliable backup, whether you choose online or offline, test the backup out and make sure you can restore the backup. I know it sounds like the old, school level talk about disaster recovery but you would be surprised by the number of people that don't check their backups and have it come back to bite them in the you-know-where.
HTH