There are many ways how to perform SQL Server backup and recovery, but the quickest is to use SQLBackupAndFTP application. Do you really need to make SQL Server backup and recovery on a regular basis? Sure. Only if you don’t care about your data or you don’t mind having to totally recreate your database in the event of a disaster. You need a way of restoring the database to a usable point.
A lot of people argue that having a redundant copy of the database some other place removes is enough to protect their SQL Server databases. But what if that copy is broken or inaccessible? SQL Server backups are necessary to ensure you can always recover your SQL Server database.
The Importance of Creating SQL Server Backup and Recovery
What types of SQL Server backups need you make? How often should you make SQL Server backup and recovery them? What effect will they have on the database? And how do you make sure that they are applicable? Making a backup strategy is actually less difficult than it might seem, even though the SQL Server backup and recovering commands have a plethora of solutions. The implementation of your backup strategy is the fairly simple portion. Making a successful method is the really important, though often ignored, part.
SQL Server Backup and Recovery Plan Creating
A common dilemma is how to get started planning SQL Server backup plan. It is well known that you shouldn’t make a backup plan, but you should design a recovery plan that lets you recover SQL Server database with the minimum damage. Your SQL Server backup and recovery strategy should grant you to meet your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Different SQL Server Backup and Recovery Plans
Only Full Backups
Having a plan that only includes full backups you’re rather restricted in what you can perform with recoveries. Basically, you can simply restore to the point of each full backup. If a disaster occurs at 20:59 on Monday, just before the following full backup is scheduled, then all the efforts since the last full backup will be lost. For this reason, if data-loss ought to be avoided and the data can not be recreated, log backups are also included.
Full Backups Plus Transaction Log Backups
Imagine that the log backups are usually made every 15 minutes. In the event that every backup are available, this means that the database can be restored to any point in time. However, this still might not be the best SQL Server backup and recovery plan. What if a failure occurs at 20:59 on Monday with this strategy? The first thing would be to take a tail-of-the-log backup and after that start restoring.
To restore the database up to the point of the catastrophe would mean restoring last Monday’s full backup and then all log backups for the past week. Depending on how much churn there was in the database during the week that could be a great amount of transaction log that will take a long period of time to replay. That’s definitely not an ideal SQL Server backup and recovery plan, but it’s a usual strategy in the subject. If you have a plan like this, make sure that you’ve trained doing a restore so you learn whether you can meet your RTO in the case of a problem.
Full Backups Plus Differential Backups Plus Transaction Log Backups
To minimize this question, some SQL Server backup and recovery strategies use more frequent full backups. But these might be prohibitively large to take day after day, for instance. The alternative is to use differential backups, that only include the data that has modified since the past full backup.
With this strategy, recovering from a failure at 20:59 on Monday is much faster. Remember that a differential backup is cumulative. So the recovery strategy is the Monday full backup, the 21:00 Monday differential backup, plus all the log backups from Monday. Possessing the differential backup from 21:00 Monday indicates that all the log backups before that can be forgotten, as the differential backup contains the same as the net result of recovering all these log backups.
Conclusion
Whenever you’ve designed your SQL Server backup and recovery strategy, test it regularly. Then you will be sure that it enables you to perform your desired restores.
Let me reveal a simple illustration. A customer has a corrupted database and planned to recover with absolutely no data-loss. They were reluctant to apply their backups and tried out working repair on a copy of the database. But it had to delete data, forcing them into operating their backups. In the end, they had a full backup from May plus a log backup every fifteen minutes up to July! The customer thought they had a great SQL Server backup and recovery plan with full recovery model plus log backups. But their backup plan didn’t enable them to do the recovery that they planned.