March 17, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Each of our database in the environment ranges from 800GB to 1.5 TB, we back them up once in a month as we update them only once in a month.
All of the data are partitioned by year. Now we are planing to backup only latest 3 yrs of data and a FULL database backup once in a year just to save on disk space for backup files as our databases has huge volume.
Please post in your comments, suggestions here.
March 17, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Sounds like a good job for a differential backup.
I'm curious why you don't want to go that route.
~BOT
Craig Outcalt
March 17, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Have you looked at Red Gate or litespeed?
March 18, 2009 at 8:20 am
we may not need diffrential backups as we do our updates only once a month. and ofcourse we do all our backups with Litespeed.
I still didnt get any comments on my question.
thanks
March 18, 2009 at 8:31 am
Hi Mike
It all depends upon the data that you need and the sensitivity of the data, some companies don't mind if the data is lost since they can recreate them within a matter of time and also the time of work involved to create them, i would say its a balancing act 🙂
March 18, 2009 at 8:41 am
800 GB isn't so big that you can't back it up more often. I have large DBs I do fulls on nightly with Red Gate. Then again I have the space to do it. I think if you have the storage (a big if) I would just do Fulls after your large update/insert. Don't get more complex than you need to.
or
Take SQL off line and have your OS backup just backup the files.
Feel free to disagree
March 18, 2009 at 8:50 am
Are your partitions in separate filegroups so you can do filegroup backups?
I think if you have a scheme that allows you to recover, and you are confident in it, I'd do it. We faced this on a small scale, moving from fulls every night to once a week with diffs in between. Quite a few people were nervous about data loss, but we were saving huge amounts of space.
If you did this, because media can degrade, I'd run 3 copies of the full, to separate media, and put them into two locations. I might even do 2 tapes, one hard drive, just to keep them separate. chances are one would still work.
March 18, 2009 at 9:01 am
Mike Levan (3/18/2009)
we may not need diffrential backups as we do our updates only once a month. and ofcourse we do all our backups with Litespeed.I still didnt get any comments on my question.
thanks
What I was trying to say was to use the diff as your monthly backup.
Craig Outcalt
March 18, 2009 at 9:24 am
1TB hard drives are pretty cheap
we use tapes and are looking to buy a LTO-4 library soon. the LTO-4 tapes are 800GB/1600GB in capacity and cost only $55 each
March 18, 2009 at 10:05 am
Mike Levan (3/17/2009)
Each of our database in the environment ranges from 800GB to 1.5 TB, we back them up once in a month as we update them only once in a month.All of the data are partitioned by year. Now we are planing to backup only latest 3 yrs of data and a FULL database backup once in a year just to save on disk space for backup files as our databases has huge volume.
Please post in your comments, suggestions here.
Backups are not designed to exclude old data based on some criteria. They work at the physical level of the database.
If you want, you could move your old data into another database, and have separate backups for that. However, that seems like a lot of work to save a ldisk space, a relatively cheap resource.
Why not just do a full backup once per month, and save older backups on tape?
March 18, 2009 at 6:39 pm
we do this, we have a few archive databases and back them up once a month or once a quarter. the next backup is on the same tapes as the previous one. data is cumulative so there is no reason to keep historical copies
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