October 11, 2007 at 5:27 pm
I would suggest getting some disk space for backups and use a tool like Litespeed or SQL Backup. I use Litespeed to backup a 1.5TB db to disk in 3 hours and 20 min with a backup size of 270GB.
I like Litespeed but have heard SQL Backup is just as good and about half the cost.
October 12, 2007 at 9:09 am
I agree that only being able to do backups to tape is a bad situation. Since you don't have room to restore a copy of the database, your only recovery option is to overwrite the existing database and start over. Can you identify the worst case loss of work, and the minimum hours of downtime? Can management put a number on what those hours will cost them?
Is there any possibility of adding enough disk space to the server to do online backups? You would have to triple the size of your SAN to have room to make shadow copies and allow for future growth. Or maybe an attached storage unit configured as multiple RAID groups so you can write striped backups.
SQL LiteSpeed would speed up your backups, make them about 75% smaller, and also give you the ability to restore individual tables without having to restore the entire 5 terabytes. Competing products such as SQL Backup may also be able to do the job, but I would evaluate them very carefully.
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