Automating SQL Server Backups on Windows: Why You Need It and How to Do It

A backup is a copy of data taken and stored elsewhere so that you can restore it in case of a database breakdown. The most common causes of a breakdown include the following:

  • Hardware issue: The data in the database can get corrupted due to errors in the physical drives. However, it is not always physical damage to the server from the outside. Disks wear out, resulting in data read and write errors.
  • Software issue: As a rule, data is written to the database by a program, in which errors may occur and lead to data corruption after updates.
  • Human issue: A person with access might unintentionally damage the data. For example, they might delete data that was not supposed to be deleted. ​​
  • Hacker issue: If attackers infiltrate your system, then they will, first of all, encrypt your database and demand a ransom for decryption.

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How to Set Up Log Shipping

If there is a need to synchronize databases on your primary server with databases located on your secondary server, then log shipping is exactly what you need. In the following article, you can find a detailed explanation about that option and the different ways to do it using SQLBackupAndFTP. More…

How to clone SQL SERVER database to a Test Environment

It doesn’t matter if a company is large or small, almost every database administrator needs to maintain a copy of the production databases in a test environment for testing and development needs.

All you need to do for this is to copy the databases from the production server to a test server, and this can be done in different ways. Let’s take a look at them. More…

How to automate maintenance of your databases

Maintenance of your databases is as important as regular backups. Once scheduled backups are set, the thought may appear that your data is safe and sound and it is, until a problem appears.

As a rule, databases don’t crash completely, but there may be a sharp decrease in performance because of server laсk of disk space or any other issues that can corrupt databases. That’s why it’s highly recommended not only to perform regular backups of your databases but also maintain them. More…

How to backup and restore Amazon RDS SQL Server

Amazon RDS SQL Server is a cloud database from Amazon, one of its differences from classic SQL Server is the way it performs backups. RDS SQL Server does not support the T-SQL BACKUP DATABASE construction but instead offers several other approaches such as restore point-in-time, snapshots, native backup to S3, and Export Data-tier Application.

Here are ways to perform a backup and restore:

  1. Snapshot creation
  2. Native backup to S3
  3. Export bacpac\dacpac
  4. Via SQLBackupAndFTP

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Scheduled Restore. How to Set Up Log Shipping

Log Shipping is SQL Server technology that is available in both the Standard and Enterprise editions. The technology may be useful in solving the following problems:

  1. Creation of read-only servers to perform heavy SQL queries and reduce the load on the primary server
  2. Creating backup servers that can be quickly put into operation in the case of a primary server failure
  3. Creating a secondary (slave) server, where data is updated with a fixed delay

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