May 20, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I need to describe our situation in order to pose this question, so please bear with me...
We currently have Maintenance plans running via scheduled SQL jobs that create our backups.
Previously, we'd only been doing one full backup nightly, and rarely ever ran test restores. Now that the company is growing, and our database has more transactions, we need the backups to be a lot more current.
After changing our backup plan to run a couple Fulls twice a week, Differentials every 6 hours, and T-Log backups every 15 minutes... we discovered a problem involving some third party backup software:
Our network guy is taking a backup uf SQL Server via Veritas netbackup every night, and it is causing the chain between my Fulls/Diffs/T-Logs to be broken. I queried the backup history tables to figure this out after unsuccessfully trying to restore to a point in time from our backups. What's even worse, is I don't have access to the backups he takes.
My question is this: Do we really even need third party backups of SQL server to disk? We are already getting the backups to disk via SQL jobs, plus the entire server is backed up to tape every night, so those SQL backups are stored there also. The main database that I'm talking about is only about 30GB in size, so keeping several days worth of backups on disk is not a problem (e.g., we don't need compressions to save disk space...yet).
Thanks!
May 20, 2009 at 3:32 pm
In my opinion you do not need the 3rd party backups as long as your SQL Backups are getting off the server and are originally on different drives than the databases themselves. I have never heard good things about the backup exec sql agent.
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
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May 20, 2009 at 3:43 pm
I would agree with Jack. If one set of backups is interfering wit the other something needs to give, and it should be the third party backups, I don't think any are as solid and reliable as SQL native backups, plus restoring the third party backups always has a layer of obfuscation.
does the network guy know how to restore the backups he's taking?
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May 20, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I have to make a plug here. If you find yourself needing to go to compressed backups, look at HyperBac. It can be installed and configured to compress your backups on the fly without changing your current maintenance plans.
May 21, 2009 at 6:50 am
Another vote for Hyperbac. We're not using it at my company because we had previously purchased Litespeed, but we're looking to age that out & replace it with Hyperbac.
Another thing you could do, to keep that backup in place, but still keep your backup chain intact, is to use the WITH COPY_ONLY clause to create the backup. This doesn't put a marker in the transaction logs, so it won't affect recovery through the regular backups you have running.
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May 21, 2009 at 7:03 am
Lynn Pettis (5/20/2009)
I have to make a plug here. If you find yourself needing to go to compressed backups, look at HyperBac. It can be installed and configured to compress your backups on the fly without changing your current maintenance plans.
so does it attach itself somehow to your native backups and compress on the way out, like an automated pkzip or gzip? does it have a detrimental effect on paging?
does it encrypt as well?
will we be banned for discussing redgate competitors? 🙂
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