Grant Fritchey (1/4/2010)

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Speak of Murphy and he will appear. Right here is a good example. No backups. Corrupt file. Just the same as flat tire, no spare.

GilaMonster (1/4/2010)

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But why would you need a backup? I mean, it's not as if a disk will fail, or someone drops a table (or the entire database) or the data file gets corrupted or an adimn deletes the mdf accidentally or data modifed yesterday needs to be undone or ... </sarcasm>

I'm almost tired of asking people if they have backups in the 'my database is corrupt'/'I need to recover deleted <something>' forum posts. The answer 99% of the time is no. The best I ever got from someone was "I didn't know I had to take backups"

And don't get me started on the 'took a backup but never tested it and now it won't restore' situation

<sigh>

ken.trock (1/4/2010)

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This is something of a sad story. Hope it works out.

I've read a lot where the final step in a backup process is to ensure you can actually restore the backup . We update our hardware frequently enough such that we do side by side updates (sometimes upgrading the SQL version too) where we restore last night's backups onto our new servers. Proof positive

Ken

Edogg (1/4/2010)

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Backups don't save jobs but restores do. Having a corrupt backup is just like having a flat spare tire.

Ronald Cartmale (1/5/2010)

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I could not agree more with the editorial and have always sort to ensure that my company’s data is protected by the best possible practice but when you work for a company whose only interest in backups is when the worst happens, then like in the film Heart Break Ridge you have to adapt and improvise.

I am constantly struggling to achieve even simple model backups because of the lack of disk storage space let alone move over to more secure complex models, and due to performance issues I am limited to doing one backup per day.

It is frightening to think that there are companies like this, but I am sure we are not alone as with everything it boils down to cost and like many many people they know they should have life, even property insurance (see some of the cases of UK flood victims) but just can’t justify the cost at the time.

Sadly, Penny wise, pound foolish.

Grant Fritchey (1/5/2010)

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My wife and I used to pay renters insurance when we lived in the city. People scoffed at us until the day we were broken into. They cleaned us out, but we were able to replace most of it because of the insurance.

We recently had a sbs2003 server running sbs2000 sql crash
It was very bad 2 of 4 Hds failed in a raid 5
I was able to run data recovery and get some sql backups which show correct file size
however when I go to restore the data to our windows 2003 std/sql2005 std server I get
backup is incorrectly formed type errors

Steve Jones - Editor (1/6/2010)

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good editorial, and nice reminder, Grant.

When I'm with Scouts, if we're out in the woods and something breaks, you need to have things to respond to that emergency. same thing with backups and your systems. You can't count on being able to run to the store to make things all better. You had better been prepared early for what might happen.