When is a Backup Considered Successful?

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Home » Article Discussions » Article Discussions by Author » Discuss content posted by Steven Bouffard » When is a Backup Considered Successful?

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When is a Backup Considered Successful?

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Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 12:18 AM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item When is a Backup Considered Successful?

Post #730487

Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 4:38 AM

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Hi
It is a really a good Article for the biginers as like me . and good ideas u have given

Regards
ksr

Post #730578

Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 5:36 AM

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Good article.

You could have carried it a bit further. Including RESTORE VERIFYONLY as a part and parcel of your backup routines adds to the overall confidence you have in your backups. You also didn't mention getting consistency checks in place to run before full backups to ensure what's being backed up is more likely to restore.

Still, this is important information to get out to people and you made a good start. Well done.

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Post #730603

Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 7:41 AM

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Good job mentioning the offsite tape testing. It's a good idea to get at least an annual test in the budget and make sure that the time to recovery doesn't increase over time. If it took 14 hours last year and takes 18 hours this year, then you need to analyze what happened in the chain... did someone forget where they had the contact information, were the restore instructions out-of-date because of server changes, etc.

Post #730673

Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 7:41 AM

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Nice article. What good does a backup do if it can't be restored? None. A disaster is not the time to find your backup plan is useless.

I would also add figuring out the timings so you know how long it will take to get the tapes and do the restore. Let everyone know it so there are no expectations that can't be met. And, test it at the most inconvenient time to see how long it takes to get it from the offsite vendor.

Post #730674

Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 8:32 AM

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Thanks for the value added comments. They're all worth appending into the article.

Post #730712

Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 9:18 AM

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there is a constant tape/disk battle here and i've used both. i'll take tape any day over disk.

in the last 9 years i've seen less than 5 tapes go bad over time. in the same time i've seen servers and disk systems die a lot more often. and with disk if the disk dies than all backups on the disk are gone.

we backup all of our SQL to tape via netbackup and the database agents. works very nice. for periodic restores we do them to QA and once in a while we call back tapes from offsite and restore them as well

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Post #730737

Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 12:19 PM

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Also, it's usually a good idea to run DBCC CHECKDB after restoring databases from backups.

Post #730883

Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 12:50 PM

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not sure about native SQL backups, but with Netbackup you can do page verification during the backup and restore if you have it set up on the database

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Post #730912

Posted Monday, June 08, 2009 1:22 PM

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The RedGate backup will also validate the file.

Post #730932

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