May 25, 2011 at 10:46 pm
Hello Everyone,
I just got hired for a company as DBA...And Im still green (4 yrs experience)...
When documenting their servers as one of my first tasks, I have seen that they only do backups to tape...They dont have any maintenance plans for backup, integrity check, optimization in SQL Server...They just do FULL backups on TAPE every night...At my old company, we always had a maintenance plan that did all that and had the backups written to a separate drive on the server...And then they would use those to copy them to TAPE...SO my question and I know it can be a loaded question with different people having different opinions and thats ok...that is good so i can get a good feel for people's perspective...But what is the best backup strategy? Do I mention to my supervisor that maintenance plans need to be created for each server with the backups going on a drive on the server? With me just starting the new job, I am not sure how much say I have and dont want to push anything?
Suggestions?
May 26, 2011 at 5:07 am
I don't know that I'd say there is a "best" strategy. However, there is one fundamental truth. Your backups are only good if you can restore them. So you run nightly backups to tape. That's fine. You know that in the event of a catastrophic loss you lose an entire day of data, right? Also, those backups are SQL Server backups to tape, right, they're not just running a system backup and assuming that they're getting the data files are they?
My advice, if everyone is happy with the backup process, and by everyone, I mean the business, not the techies, leave it alone. But test it. Make sure you can run a restore from the tape. Time how long it takes to get yesterday's tape or the day before, mounted and restored for one database, then report that number back to management. If they're happy, you're done (except you should still practice regularly doing restores). If not, then you have to go to work to figure out what will make them happy.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
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May 27, 2011 at 12:01 am
I would suggest you to understand a few things here which are ofcourse related with you business needs and ofcourse if see some gap between the backup strategies and the business needs then put your recommendation forward to bridge that gap .
But first look for these options..
The recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO) are two very specific parameters which we must look at very closely while designing our backup strategy. Infact i never design backup strategy i rather design my Restore strategy because taking a backup does not mean it is restorable. I hope you understand what i mean here.
The RTO is how long your business can wait without that application. This is always related with your minimum or maximum allowable outage.
The RPO is a little different. It defines the allowable data loss -- how much data can I afford to lose.
So, The decision would depend on these factors for me.
Regards,
Sachin
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