January 18, 2011 at 11:18 pm
Hi,
Does anyone perform backups in their testing environments? We do, not for recovery purposes, but more to emulate our production environment as much as possible. I have exactly the same maintenance plans setup in the test environment as the production environment.
I had been discussing this with my DBA colleague and he suggested getting rid of our backups in the test environment altogether as it just causes more work and does not provide any benefit. However my argument against this was that it was creating one more point of difference between our test and production environment. I admit although config wise the two environments are identical, their hardware is not, with test being on a VM and production on Physical.
I was wondering if anybody else was (or wasn't) doing this? I know where he is coming from, but at the same time it feels wrong!
Any thoughts?
Regards,
Warren.
January 18, 2011 at 11:43 pm
Backing up a test environment is always good. What u can do is that perform a full backup on a daily basis and dont take copies of those on tape or some other location. Test environment backups can be kept on the test server iself and the retention period can be specified as a day or two.
Cheers,
Satnam
January 19, 2011 at 7:47 am
We back up and copy our beta environment to a local NAS. If there are problems, it's quicker to recover this way than pulling down a prod copy from the remote hosting site and applying DDL/DML changes.
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- Nate
January 19, 2011 at 8:01 am
Warren
My view is that you should back up everything (within reason) and then it's there if you need it. Just because you can't think of a reason why a backup of a particular database might be needed, it doesn't mean there isn't one.
Your point about making test environments as close as possible to live is not one I'd considered before in the context of backups, but it's a good one. I shall use it when arguing for backups of test in my office!
John
January 19, 2011 at 10:46 am
We perform a Full Backup weekly and a Differential Backup nightly on our Development AND QA SQL Servers. Partially as a way to mimic the Production environment, partially to allow for recovery should a particular task/job/modification/etc. is a simple issue that a restore would save time with.
Chris Powell
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