The database backup should be considered at the beginning of automation system design. The energy management system（EMS） has special requirements for data scream， backup version， backup time and restoring time. Therefore the commonly used commercial backup tools can't meet the operational requirements of EMS. Besides， the current commercial backup softwares don't support the time-series databases. This paper studied the schemes of the data backup in power system EMS， and proposed a feasible data backup and recovery strategy， which complied with the power system security requirements， and been put into practice in China Southern Power Grid EMS.