I have moved large DB's in the past from one physical location to another and the way - I have achieved this is by taking a full backup using WINRAR...

Thanks for your replies guys.  Actually its a messed up column, not sure who did this as its been like that for a long time.  Field Stores a whole lot...

Moral of the story - If you need to delete a large table, scary as is it, truncate the table first and then drop it.  Truncate is non-logged.

Your DB Disaster recovery plan should depend on how big your DB is how transaction oriented it is.  Accordingly plan on FULL, DEF and Trans log backup.  Some of my...

Do this during off-peak times or times when activity is minimal on the DB server.

David,

There is no issue with restoring a SQL 7 BAK to a SQL 2000 Server.  Its relatively painless.  Just need to make sure you update your stats after restoring.

Also...

Check intel - I think there is a tool that you can download and run which will give you information on  "logical processers" and "Physical processers" on a server.

Make sure you choose to script out contraints, indexes etc when you generate the SQL Scripts.

I use psexec to stop/start services on remote machines.  You just need to make sure you have permissions to do it. http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/psexec.shtml

DBCC LOG is tough to make sense off.  I think 3rd partly log readers is the way to go.  Lumigent is good - but pricey ofcourse.  Have not tried the...

Why don't you see if you can break down into smaller transactions?

Looks like you need to manage your trans log first, truncate the log and shrink it - then do the full db backup and then restore that backup.

You will actually need to backup the log with no_log to clear the inactive part of the log without actually taking a backup, something like:

backup log dbname with no_log

And then...

Best to do both.  That is defrag your indexes and also do a disk defrag.  But to get the most of your disk frag - you will need to take...

Ha Ha - the good news is because of clients like this - the future is bright for us.  Hope there are more like this client