I was thrilled to host TSQL Tuesday #85, the last TSQL Tuesday of 2016. My subject was backup and recovery and I was pleased to see this line of my invitation quoted several times.

Backups are one of the most common things DBAs discuss, and they are at once one of the simplest and most complicated parts of our whole job. So let’s hear it for backup and recovery!

Because let’s face it whole books are written on the subject and yet it’s one of the very first things a DBA should learn. Because it is one of those subjects everyone has to learn one way or another I had a large number of responses (which explains my delay in getting this rollup out, sorry about that). However, the large number of responses makes this list an excellent course on backup and recovery. It’s by no means comprehensive but if you read each of these posts you will have a great start into what’s necessary and what’s possible.

So enough with the intro and on with the study work!

#EntryLevel backup and recovery

• Intro to backup & recovery 101: In what appers to be the first post of a series Angela Tidwell (b/t) tells us about the most important role of a SQL Server DBA.
• Intro to backup & recovery 102: Deborah Melkin (b/t) asks “Why do we run restores?”
• Intro to backup & recovery 103: Michelle Haarhues (b/t) gives us a basic overview of backup and recovery.
• Intro to backup & recovery 104: Here we get a rundown of the various recovery modes by Chris Sommer (b/t).
• Intro to backup & recovery 201: In this blog Aaron Bertrand (b/t) gives us a more in-detail overview of backup and recovery.
• Practical 101: Kevin Hill (b/t) gives us an #EntryLevel video demo of doing backups and recovery.
• Practical 102: Marek Masko (b/t) walks us through maintence plans.
• Practical 103: Jens Vestergaard (b/t) walks us through backing up an SSAS database in multiples ways including the GUI, XMLA and Powershell.
• Practical 104: Need to restore to a point in time? Derik Hammer (b/t) tells us how.
• Practical 201: Andy Mallon (b/t) uses Powershell to set up Azure storage to give us a place to store our backups.
• Overview 101: Rob Farley (b/t) points out that too many of us concentrate on backups and not on our ability to actually recover from a disaster.
• Overview 102: Dave Mason (b/t) points out that we don’t always need a backup to recover data. Not if we do a bit of preperation first.

DBATools.io

dbatools.io is a free Powershell module with over 100 SQL Server best practice, administration and migration commands included.

• dbatools.io Intro: Want an overview of what dbatools.io is? Chrissy LeMaire (b/t) gives us one with an emphasis on backup and recovery.
• dbatools.io 101: Stuart Moore (b/t) discusses making restores easier using dbatools.io.
• dbatools.io 102: Constantine Kokkinos (b/t) discusses two very helpful commands for managing snapshots.
• dbatools.io 103: Chris Lumnah (b/t) shows us the difference between the T-SQL and Powershell scripts to perform a backup and recovery, then goes into how dbatools.io has expanded the available Powershell commands available to give us historical information about backups and recovered databases.

Minion

• Alerting 101: In this post Sean McCown (b/t) of Minionware talks about going a step beyond your standard backup alerts and of course how Minion Backup and Minion Enterprise can help you get there.

Compression and Encryption

• Backup Compression 101: Thomas Rushton (b/t) discusses the benefits of backup compression.
• TDE Recovery 101: Arun Sirpal (b/t) gives us a really nice example of backing up and restoring the certificate necessary to recover a database encrypted by TDE to a new server.

Internals

• Recovery internals 101: John Deardurff (b/t) gives us a brief look at the internals of recovering a database and the definitions of recovery and restore.

Other

• Class 101: Robert Davis (b/t) points out that the backup command has a NORECOVERY clause and what the implications of that are.
• Class 102: I discuss the myth that you can only restore one differential backup.
• Class 103: Learn more about how differentials work (and backups in general) in Robert Davis’ (b/t) second contribution.
• Class 104: Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan (b/t) discusses backup and restore as relates to multi tenanted databases, specifically dealing with them in the cloud.
• Upgrades 101: Learn about cross version restores with Steve Jones (b/t). (up not down)

Final Disclaimer

There were a lot of posts and I read every single one. But that said, I could only write so much up about each one and towards the end my brain was slowing down a bit. So if you wrote one of these posts and I messed up my description on it, then by all means, contact me on twitter and correct me and I will get it fixed.

Filed under: Backups, Microsoft SQL Server, Powershell, SQLServerPedia Syndication, T-SQL Tuesday Tagged: backup strategy, backups, disaster recovery, microsoft sql server, recovery strategy, T-SQL Tuesday