August 13, 2009 at 3:55 am
I have a medium db of about 80Gb (Full Mode) which gets backed up daily to tape. 🙂
However, I like to also have disk backups of all my dbs ready to restore whenever needed in case of disaster 😀 . My ideal situation would be a full weekly backup (to disk) with daily differentials (to disk). This fits the backup window nicely. 😎
But it doesn't work. :pinch:
Because the tape full backups fubar the differentials. :crying:
Any ideas? To add to the utter joy of this system, the backups to disk have to be made to a network disk. Don't ask, just don't ask. I know it's hideous.
I could run the gauntlet of just having the backups to tape but people keep asking for a "quick" test restore on the development systems so they can have uptodate data in there.
August 13, 2009 at 4:02 am
Why not backup to disk, and then copy from disk to tape?
August 13, 2009 at 4:50 am
I don't control the backups to tape and they are set to backup all including the SQL databases. :ermm:
August 13, 2009 at 4:54 am
Any chance you could change the tape backups to be COPY_ONLY?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191495(SQL.90).aspx
August 13, 2009 at 5:07 am
Heh, I was just reading up on that, wasn't even aware of the option. Always something new to learn...
In answer, no.
I'm wondering about a change of tactics: Create a second copy of the database in dev and somehow keep it both uptodate and available for SELECTS and other bits. Hmmm...
August 13, 2009 at 5:16 am
If you database is in FULL recovery mode, what is happening with the t-log backups? Are you in charge of those?
If you can keep these under your control, you can start from any full backup you've got (the full you take once a week) and apply every t-log to get to whatever state you want.
Kyle
August 13, 2009 at 5:51 am
The first thing you need to do is find out what time the tape backup starts and how long it takes. Find your window. If you can't do copy_only, you really only have a few options.
Note that if you do TL backups, you will have to restart the restore every time from the last full backup, and then each TL after, so you need to consider this for restore time. Could work though.
I'd suggest finding how big YOUR window is and see if you can get a full backup time done in that time frame. Don't forget about backup compression software. If over network you will save time on network copy time and can generally expect 70-90% compression rate if you don't have much binary data saved in your tables. The cost is an easy sell for the benefit you could get.
August 13, 2009 at 9:48 am
are you using a database agent for your tape backups? Netbackup supports data file backups. Why not just backup the files to tape and do the SQL backups to disk
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