Evaluate hardware and memory resources

When planning your backup system, evaluate your hardware and memory resources.

Evaluate the following database server and hardware configuration elements to determine which storage manager and storage devices to use:
  • The number of I/O virtual processors
  • The amount of memory available and the distribution of processor activity

Also consider temporary disk space needed for backup and restore. The database server uses temporary disk space to store the before images of data that are overwritten while backups are occurring and overflow from query processing that occurs in memory.

When preparing to back up data, make sure that you correctly set the DBSPACETEMP environment variable or parameter to specify dbspaces with enough space for your needs. If there is not enough room in the specified dbspaces, the backup will fail, root dbspace will be used, or the backup will fail after filling the root dbspace.