January 17, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Just wondering, after configuring a High Protection database mirror between a principal and mirrored server, is it possible to perform full backups of the database on the Principal server or will that interfere with the mirroring process ie. the transaction log backup numbers will be out of synch.
I raise this question in case of the scenario that both the principal and mirrored servers were to suffer a hardware issue that required a rebuild of both. How do you restore the backup of your database on a new server if you couldn't use a backup file of the database.
So if you wanted to perform a weekly full backup of the database, would you need to pause mirroring on the principal, backup the database/log and restore to the mirror server before resuming mirroring between the two servers to make sure both the database and mirror are completely in synch?
January 17, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Yes, it's possible. In fact it's no less important to perform backups the same as if mirroring weren't enabled since the database is in the FULL recovery model. No changes have to be made to perform the backups.
Mirroring doesn't change the LSN's either. It only looks at them to make sure the principal and mirror are in synch.
I haven't tried this but I understand you can even mix a log shipping configuration with mirroring if you wanted a standby server in addition to the mirror/principal.
Have a look at this article for more detail:http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/dbmirror.mspx
January 31, 2014 at 6:42 am
As mentioned yes it is possible and in fact you can set up a plan to do the backups regularly as well. Thing I noticed though is this (at least I ran into this and maybe I did something wrong) but if you do set up a plan to regularly do backups of the logs and db and you have a failover you won't be taking backups on the mirror which now became the Principle.
I didn't catch the failover once and we went a few days without backups. My log file also grew because the log backups weren't happening. So yes it's possible just make sure you are aware of all the other aspects of mirroring when setting it up.
January 31, 2014 at 7:45 am
Please note: 5 year old thread.
It's entirely possible to set the backup jobs up on the mirror as well, just have them check the DB status when they run, if online, continue with backup, if not, abort.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
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