You must design and carry out an appropriate backup strategy to ensure a successful upgrade.

To develop a backup strategy, consider the following questions:

• How long can the production database remain inoperable before business consequences become intolerable?

• What backup strategy is necessary to meet your availability requirements?

• Are backups archived in a safe, offsite location?

• How quickly can backups be restored (including backups in offsite storage)?

• Have recovery procedures been tested successfully?

Your backup strategy should answer all of these questions and include procedures for successfully backing up and recovering your database.