Advice in restore and backup check schedule

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Advice in restore and backup check schedule

sql-lover

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Points: 18530
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April 29, 2013 at 2:29 pm

#292764

Ok,
We all know how important to check (and restore) your backup file is, right? 😉 ... so I am trying to follow that good practice without making it an impossible task. (I have hundreds of databases assigned to me, space and time is limited)
So my question would be, or more kind of a poll question, what schedule do you use? Here's what I am trying to implement.
-Weekly check (Sundays): critical clients or anything above 100GB
-Monthly check(Sundays): anything lower than 100GB or any other client.
I am using RedGate 7.0 which allows me, as part as the regular check, do the following:
-Grab backup file from backup repository using Scheduled Restore feature
-Restore database
-Run DBCC
-Delete if everything went fine
-Send email informing
For the Weekly checks, I was planning to start those at 2am, 4am, 6am, and so on. Now, the Monthly checks is what confuses me. I was planning to do that randomly, but how should I schedule those?
Any hints? :rolleyes:
By the way, the SQL instance I am using is not a production box. So does not running anything critical. However, I prefer to restore and check weekends, so it will not make it too slow (it's a VMware machine)
Any suggestion is highly appreciated

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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sql-lover SSCoach Points: 18530 More actions · Answer 1

BUMP!

wow, no one ? 🙁 ... I just want to "hear" from other and their current restore / dbcc check strategy,

Neeraj Dwivedi SSCertifiable Points: 6768 More actions · Answer 2

I do not have any tools, I use batch scripts and SQL jobs to accomplish this. For our most critical applications, I do restore the backups in the Testing environments every week, to check if backups are fine.

For every others, I do that automatically to but using windows and SQL job scheduling mechanism, so that I must check every DB in six months.

We send email in case of success & alert in case of failure.

sql-lover SSCoach Points: 18530 More actions · Answer 3

Neeraj Dwivedi (5/6/2013)
I do not have any tools, I use batch scripts and SQL jobs to accomplish this. For our most critical applications, I do restore the backups in the Testing environments every week, to check if backups are fine.
For every others, I do that automatically to but using windows and SQL job scheduling mechanism, so that I must check every DB in six months.
We send email in case of success & alert in case of failure.

Thanks for reply.

I pretty much know what to do with critical ones, and the schedule I need. But not so sure about frequency for non critical ones.

So, just curious ... based on your schedule and amount of non critical databases, how many non critical ones you need to restore weekly (or daily) so you can cover all of them in a six month period?

Neeraj Dwivedi SSCertifiable Points: 6768 More actions · Answer 4

Compared to your environment, mine is really small. I have to support close to 50 prod Dbs.

sqlsurfing SSCarpal Tunnel Points: 4883 More actions · Answer 5

I would imagine backup process "really" depends on your organization's requirements.

Backup the database with "Checksum" (Just to be safe using checksum)

Then using a Restore Verify Only

and using DBCC CheckDb are good.

Although those above depends on available maint window, it sounds there is tight time constraint if verification happens elsewhere later?

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