Sql Anywhere 11: Restoring incremental backup failure

backuprestoresybase-sql-anywhere

We want to create remote incremental backups after a full backup. This will allow us to restore in the event of a failure and bring up another machine with as close to real time backups as possible with SQL Anywhere network servers.

We are doing a full backup as follows:

dbbackup -y -c "eng=ServerName.DbName;uid=dba;pwd=sql;links=tcpip(host=ServerName)"
    c:\backuppath\full

This makes a backup of the database and log files and can be restored as expected. For incremental backups I've tried both live and incremental transaction logs with a renaming scheme if there are multiple incremental backups:

dbbackup -y -t -c "eng=ServerName.DbName;uid=dba;pwd=sql;links=tcpip(host=ServerName)"
    c:\backuppath\inc

dbbackup -y -l -c "eng=ServerName.DbName;uid=dba;pwd=sql;links=tcpip(host=ServerName)" 
    c:\backuppath\live

However, on applying the transaction logs on restore I always receive an error when applying the transaction logs to the database:

10092: Unable to find table definition for table referenced in transaction log

The transaction log restore command is:

dbeng11 "c:\dbpath\dbname.db" -a "c:\backuppath\dbname.log"

The error doesn't specify what table it can't find but this is a controlled test and no tables are being created or dropped. I insert a few rows then kick off an incremental backup before attempting to restore.

Does anyone know the correct way to do incremental backup and restore on Sql Anywhere 11?

UPDATE: Thinking it may be related to the complexity of the target database I made a new blank database and network service. Then added one table with two columns and inserted a few rows. Made a full backup, then inserted and deleted a few more rows and committed transactions, then made an incremental backup. This also failed with the same error when attempting to apply the incremental backups of transaction logs after restoring the full backup …

Edit:

You can follow this link to see the same question with slightly more feedback on SA: http://sqlanywhere-forum.sybase.com/questions/4760/restoring-incrementallive-backup-failure

Best Answer

Summarizing the information linked to in the post above....

The command you have used is for a live backup but what you want is an incremental backup. The approach you want to use (per this blog) uses somewhat different switches. You want to use the -n -t -x switches, and the -o to specify a log file. So the command ends up something like:

dbbackup -n -t -x -c "eng=ServerName.DbName;uid=dba;pwd=sql;links=tcpip(host=ServerName)" -o "c:\backup\backup_log.txt"
Related Question