Backing up a SAP HANA Cloud Database

In this lesson, you'll learn how SAP automatically backups your SAP HANA database instance in a default backup cycle of 14 days. You'll also learn how to verify the success of the daily backups and view all the available backup generations.

You are responsible for an SAP HANA Cloud database instance. In the case of an emergency, it's your job to recover the SAP HANA Cloud database. That's why you want to make sure that backups made by SAP are all successful.

SAP employs backup processes and other measures that ensure rapid recovery of business-critical systems as and when necessary.

SAP HANA offers comprehensive functionality to safeguard your database and ensure that it can be recovered speedily and with maximum business continuity. The SAP HANA database instances are continually backed up to safeguard your company data and to ensure that it can be recovered speedily. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is no more than 15 minutes.

The backups are encrypted using the capabilities of the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider. To ensure even a higher safety level, the backups are replicated in additional availability zones in the same region.

To ensure data security, it is necessary to perform data and log backups at appropriate intervals. In the SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database the backups are performed by SAP. The following backup actions are performed:

• Initial data Snapshot and complete data backup on instance creation
• A complete data backups every 24 hours.
• Automatic log backups every 15 minutes.
• Automatic catalog backups every 15 minutes.

The daily backups are only created when the database is online. By default 14 daily backups are retained. This creates 14 backup generations.

Backups in the cloud are managed by SAP. Your database is backed up automatically to ensure that it can be recovered to its most recent consistent state. It is not possible to make changes to the backup configuration.

To display more information about database backups, you need to open SAP HANA cockpit. On the Database Overview page, with the All view selected, search for, and then select the Database Backups card.

The following information from the backup catalog is displayed:

• Time range that the backup catalog covers
• Space occupied by each backup type
• Total size of the backup catalog
• Information about the most recent backups within the selected time range.

  By default, the last four weeks are displayed.

Select a particular backup row to display more details about the backup. In the backup details, you can see the file name and duration of the backup, its size, the service, and the host on which it was created.

You can specify what information is displayed or change the order in which the columns are displayed. Choose Settings. Select what information to display or use the arrow buttons to change the order. In the same way, you can also customize the backup details pages for each database.

To recover a SAP HANA database to a certain Point in Time (PIT), you need the most current Complete Data Backup before the PIT as a starting point. To reach the specified PIT, you need all the consecutive incremental, differential, and log backups.

The Backup Generations view shows an overview from all complete data backups and its consecutive incremental, differential, and log backups grouped together. This view is very useful to determine the correct recovery start point.

To display the backup generations overview page, choose the chart icon. The chart shows the start time of every backup generation, it's total size, and the sizes of the full data backup and the associated delta backups and log backups that can be used in for a recovery.

To customize the information displayed in the backup catalog, choose the Filter icon. In the dialog, you can filter the following information:

• Backup Type: Select the backup types to display.
• Status: Select the backup status to display.
• Start Time: Select the time range in which to display the backup generations.

In some use cases the default 14 days retention period, setup by SAP, might not be sufficient. For these scenarios the SAP HANA Cloud Central allows the database administrator to change the backup retention time.

To change the backup retention time, start the SAP HANA Cloud Central application, select your database and start the Manage Configuration application found in the °°°(More) menu.

For the backup retention time, you can specify a value between 1 and 215. Be aware that specifying a longer backup retention time will increase the backup storage you require, which will then affect the costs.