Backup Technology

  • If I may survey my fellow DBAs... what technology are you using for production database backups? To make the responses more uniform, I'd like to pose the following questions:

    Hardware (brand, type of technology e.g. ext hd, tape, optical)

    Software (vendor-supplied, 3rd party apps, or custom written)

    Backup Schedule (e.g. incremental nightly, full weekly?)

    Total Size of databases to backup

    Time window for backup (hours - how fast must backups run?)

    Thanks for participating!

  • I think you'll get answers all over the board.

    Hardware is driven, often, but what is used by the company already. I think most people go to tape, but I know there are many people using disk backups. We have a combination here at SSC. We backup locally, log ship to a remote machine, then our hosting company gets it to tape.

    Software - I would guess that most people use native SQL Server backups. I would hope the split was more custom scripts than maintenance plans, but it could go either way. Lots of people use SQL Backups/Litespeed/Idera, but no idea of the splits there. Just for cost reasons, I'd think it's the minority. I have used SQLBackup (we use it here) and Litespeed (we used to use it) and both worked well.

    Schedule - We do a full each night, and regular log backups, shipped to a DR machine. I have done weekly full + daily incremental and hourly logs before.

    Size, we're near 40GB raw, compresses down to around 10GB for backups

    Window - No real issues here. We backup when we need to. Overnight is our typical schedule.

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