Backup design, restore testing, integrity checks, and corruption response.
292 associated posts117 primary posts
BACKUP LOG WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY is a dangerous command: it empties out the contents of your SQL Server's transaction log without really backing it up. Database administrators sometimes run this command right before shrinking their log file with a DBCC SHRINKFILE command, thereby freeing up drive space. Why 'truncate_only' is not a recognized backup option. When…
Backup speed isn't the sexiest thing DBAs spend time on during the day. It's kind of boring.
Backups don't complain that they're not running fast enough. Users, those are the ones who complain: "My query's not fast enough. Why can't I do a cross join between data warehouse tables?" The squeaky wheel gets the lube, so we bend the users over the - wait, where was I going with that?
Richard Jones, a DBA in the UK, asked in with a question, and rather than giving my own opinion, I thought it'd be better to ask it here to get everybody's opinion in the comments: The DB team that I am a member of are about to take control of a number of SQL Server…
David Friend, the CEO of Carbonite, left a comment on my blog entry about Carbonite. I'd like to applaud his efforts for taking the time to do that, but the comment raised some ugly questions. It appears that they were putting data on 15-drive RAID 5 arrays. RAID 5 is the most cost effective array setup (other than RAID 0, which offers no data protection).
In a perfect world, my test/QA servers get restored nightly from production. Let's say every night at 9pm, the production full backups kick off, and they're finished by 10pm. At 11pm, the QA box kicks off a restore job that grabs the latest full backups off the file share and restores them. The production backups are written to a file share, never local storage, so there's no additional overhead on the production box for this restore process.
TechCrunch reports that Carbonite, an online backup company, lost customer data.
But wait, this is different: it's not their fault. They're suing Promise Technology, makers of popular storage gear, for selling them bogus equipment. Bogus equipment? You mean, like hard drives that fail? That's horrible! Who could expect something like that? Who could know about the dangers that lurk around every corner?
Bookmark sharing site Ma.gnolia just had a big problem (not quite clear from the site what it was) and user data was trashed. They needed to restore from backup.
Only one little problem - they didn't have one.
When your managers ask you that question, point them to the sad story of JournalSpace.com. The company evaporated on December 30, 2008 because they didn't have a backup.
They were relying on their RAID drive mirrors to keep their data safe, but that only protects you from hard drive failures - not from application errors or server errors or heaven forbid, malicious users who delete data.
Database administrators: are you backing up your SQL Servers to local drives? If so, you need to stop for a minute to think about a few possible side effects, and maybe think about backing up to a network share instead. Why? I'm glad you asked!
Get your data off the server faster
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Before we start looking at SQL Server backup compression software, we need to spend a few minutes looking at the weaknesses of the native SQL Server backup process. In order to judge the fixes, we have to know what's broken. Native SQL Server backups take the same disk space as the data. When we back…
I've been backing up SQL Servers for almost a decade now, and it's time to share the lessons I've learned. All of this is my own opinion - your mileage may vary - but I'll try to explain the reasoning behind the choices I make. I won't address log shipping or snapshots this time around.…
