Sybase Cumulative Dump / Backup

Sybase has a relatively new backup called cumulative which backs up all the changes in the database since the last Full Backup/Dump and can be used in between Full Backups and Tran backups to give greater flexibility, especially on large databases. It is similar to the Differential Backup in SQL Server

To enable this backup for a database you must first enable the “allow incremental dumps” option in the database: e.g sp_dboption <dbname>, ‘allow incremental dumps’, true

You can then issue the cumulative backup command as long as there is an existing valid Full Dump backup:
dump database <dbname> cumulative to “/tmp/tore1-cum.dmp”
go


To load the cumulative dump the syntax is:
load database <dbname> cumulative from “/tmp/tore1-cum.dmp”
go

Backup / Restore order

In terms of using the cumulative backup you could for example take a weekly Full backup, then daily cumulative backups and hourly transaction log backups.

So in a recovery situation you would first recover the Full Backup, then the latest Cumulative Backup and finally the transaction log dumps up to the required point in time.