In practice, it can happen that structural or media failures are already contained in the backup of a serverdb or tape. In such a case, as sometimes for organizational reasons, it is necessary to restart with a previous state of the database.
This is possible if several backup generations are used. A backup generation consists of a complete backup and any number of subsequent incremental physical and logical backups. The next complete backup starts a new backup generation.
The administration of several backup generations provides several reentry positions for the recovery of a serverdb thus increasing data protection.
The backup generations are denoted by letters; they are part of the label identifying a backup. The number of backup generations can be defined under the Backup / Label Manager / Generation menu item.