What is a database backup and how often should it be performed?

Database backup is the process of creating a copy of data to protect against data loss due to failures, user errors, hardware issues, or other unforeseen situations. A backup allows restoring the database to a certain state.

The frequency of backups depends on the criticality of the data and recovery requirements:

• For important systems with high load — daily or even hourly incremental backups.
• For less critical systems — weekly full copies.

A combined approach is also often used: full backups once a week and incremental backups daily.

It is important to consider RPO (Recovery Point Objective) — the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) — the time within which the system must be restored.