Monthly System Backups ?

  • We are a small DBA team (2) in a large environment (of course) with hundreds of SQL servers and thousands of databases. We use Ola Hallengren's maintenance scripts and tweek them to our needs.

    Here's the question we have A LOT of very static database instances, no jobs other than Ola's no linked servers not much going on other than read/writes/updates to user databases. Don't use model database.

    So we were thinking that the standard Weekly backup of System databases is rather pointless and going to a Monthly schedule, with the caveat that should we add/modify jobs, linked servers etc we would just then manually run the System backup after we are done

    Can't find any info on this other than you should backup system databases, and the default picture seems to be weekly.

    We do have a few systems that have a lot of activity in the configuration etc and would not use a monthly schedule on these for system backups.

    Any thoughts on this from others.

  • Ola's stuff takes care of backups auto-magically and could easily be made to exclude the system databases. My question is, why even bother? The databases aren't big, take virtually no time to execute the backups for, and such backups are a life saver if you ever need them. Contrary to your thoughts, I do a full backup of the system databases every night and I always keep to active copies of the backups. I think not backing them up nightly takes more effort and has little to offer in terms of ROI.

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

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