Summary: As database servers proliferate in modern information systems architectures in organizations, the issue of protecting and recovering the databases becomes of utmost importance. By developing an analytical model based on a closed network of queues, this paper analyses how different database recovery mechanisms impact on the normal transaction processing. Such a model enables one to capture intricate effects that are peculiar to complex, tightly coupled, multi-component systems, such as database recovery systems, and can be used to facilitate the design and the tuning of database recovery managers. The proposed model provides important performance measures in terms of average transaction processing time and overall systems throughput. Numerical experiments using actual recovery methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the modelling approach.