Today there are numerous methods how to perform SQL Server backup and restore them. But if you are looking for the simplest one use SQLBackupAndFTP. Is it really necessary to make SQL Server backup and restore? Of course! Except when you don’t proper care about your SQL Server data or you don’t mind having to totally recreate your database in the event of a disaster. You need some way of restoring the database to a usable point.
SQL Server Backup and Restore
Quite a lot people say that having an extra copy of the SQL Server database some other place is a greater way to protect SQL Server database. But what will they do if that copy is damaged or inaccessible? SQL Server backups are required to be sure you’ll be able to recover your database.
But what kind of SQL Server backups should you take? How frequent should you perform SQL Server backup and restore them? What influence will they have on your SQL Server database? And how do you make sure they are appropriate? Creating a backup strategy is really less difficult than it might seem. Even though the SQL Server backup and restoring commands have a plethora of options. The implementation of your SQL Server backup and restore plan is the fairly trouble-free component. Making a working plan is the very important, though often ignored, question.
SQL Server Backup and Restore Plan
A popular question is how to get started creating SQL Server database backup plan. It is known that you shouldn’t design a backup strategy, but you should design a recovery strategy. That enables you to recover SQL Server database with the lowest loss. SQL Server backup and restore plan should grant you to meet your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Different Types of SQL Server Backup and Restore
First Type – Full Backups Only
Having a plan that just includes full backups you’re pretty restricted in what you can make with restores. Basically, you can just recover to the time period of each SQL Server full backup. If disaster strikes at 11:59 on Thursday, just before the following full backup is scheduled, then all the work since the last full backup will be lost. Because of this, if data-loss requires to be stopped and the data can not be recreated, transaction log backups are also included.
Second Type – Full Backup and Transaction Log Backup
Consider that the transaction log backups are being made each 30 minutes. As long as every the backup are available, this indicates that the database can be restored to any point in time. Nevertheless, this still is quite possibly not the most useful SQL Server backup and restore strategy. What if disaster strikes at 11:59 on Thursday with this strategy? The first thing would be to take a tail-of-the-log backup and then start recovering.
To restore the database up to the point of the catastrophe would need to restore last Thursday’s full backup and then all transaction log backups for the last week. According to how much stir there was in the database over the full week that could be a huge amount of transaction log that will get a long period of time to replay. That’s obviously not an excellent SQL Server backup and restore strategy. But it’s a typical plan in the field. If you have a plan similar to this, make sure that you’ve practiced doing a recovery so you learn whether you can meet your RTO in the case of a catastrophe.
Third Type – Full Backup, Differential Backups Plus Transaction Log Backup.
To minimize this problem, some SQL Server backup and restore strategies apply more frequent full backups, but these might be prohibitively large to take every day, for instance. The choice is to use differential backups, that only have the data that has updated since the previous full backup.
With such plan, recovering from a disaster at 11:59 on Thursday is faster. Keep in mind that a differential backup is cumulative, so the restore plan is the Thursday full backup, the 12:00 Thursday differential backup and additionally all transaction log backups from Thursday. Possessing the differential backup from 12:00 Thursday means that all the transaction log backups before that can be missed, as the differential backup covers the same as the net result of restoring all these log backups.
Summation
Once you’ve planned your SQL Server backup and restore plan, ensure that you check it out to be sure that it lets you execute your desired restores.
Here is a simple example. A user had a damaged database and planned to recover with zero-data-loss. They were unwilling to make use of their backups and tried out working recovery on a duplicate of the database. But it had to delete data, pushing them into using their backups. It ended up that they had a full backup from March plus a transaction log backups every fifteen minutes up to June! The user believed they had a great SQl Server backup and restore strategy. They had full recovery model plus transaction log backups. Their backup plan didn’t let them perform the restore process that they planned.