jasona.work (8/28/2015)
mike 57299 (8/27/2015)
Thank you for the info.In your opinion, which is better - full every night or full once a week and differentials?
Mike
Short answer, it depends.
Long answer, it depends on several things. Will your nightly fulls be able to complete in a reasonable amount of time?
Seeing as the differentials go back to the last full, are the later diffs getting bigger than you'd like?
Will you have sufficient storage to keep a week or more worth of fulls?
Do you or your team take backups of the DBs to restore for testing / development / whatever to other servers? If so, do you always remember to make them copy-only so as to not mess up the differential base? (in which case daily fulls might not be a bad idea, but if you do diffs during the day you'll still need to remember to copy-only them.)
As some background, my current backup system is:
Sunday Full
Monday, Tuesday Differential
Wednesday Full
Friday Differential
M-F Transaction Log every 2hrs
That works for my systems, and my RPO / RTOs, but it may not work for you and yours.
Jason
You don't actually have to do a full backup of a large database in one swell foop. 😛 With a little creativity with files/file groups and, perhaps, some partitioning here and there, you can spread out the "full" backups on huge databases over several nights. Keep them log files rolling...
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.