August 1, 2002 at 10:36 am
As part of our Disaster Recovery (DR) exercise we want to duplicate an existing SQL 7/2k server environment on a totally new box. We dump all databases nightly on the original server and plan to use those dumps to create the new server SQl environment. My question relates to database restore order. I plan to restore the master DB first (in single user mode), then msdb, then user databases. Is this order OK or do you have a different approach?
TIA,
Bill
August 1, 2002 at 12:15 pm
Bill,
This is the procedure we follow in a DR situation. Actually, we take the backup tape and restore it in its entirety. This gets us the OS and all the binaries.
We then run rebuildm.exe to rebuild the master database so we can start SQL Server up in single user mode. Since the database files are open and we choose not to backup them up directly through the 3rd party product, this is necessary.
We then step through the process you've listed.
It worked great for us last year at our DR test.
K. Brian Kelley
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/bkelley/
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
August 1, 2002 at 1:33 pm
Brian,
This is off the subject but you mentioned you restore the entire OS from a tape backup. What software do you use? When we tried the same thing with ArcServe on a Win 2k box (with a clean OS install) the OS restore tried to overwrite array drivers on the new box and the box crashed. After all the hardware on our DR box isn't identical to that of the original server. Also unless you use an open file agent you can't capture the live sql databases. Any info on this matter much appreciateed.
TIA,
Bill
August 1, 2002 at 1:47 pm
We were restoring to similar hardware, so we didn't have the driver issues and the like. We did use ArcServe, though. Our DR contract allows us to specify hardware, to a certain extent.
I'm in the group who isn't very high on the agents running through a 3rd party backup software, so we don't use the ArcServe software to backup live (open databases). I've seen 'em fail. What we do is we create a backup of the database to disk locally, then copy the file off to a "backup" server which has all of the SQL Server backups. This ensures during the work day at least two copies of the backup files will be available. The same is true of our backup tapes. When we restore the files in DR, the backups are already local. If, for whatever reason, there was a problem with them, we would pull from the backup server. A key difference between the two is locally we keep a minimal number of copies. On the backup server we keep up to a week.
K. Brian Kelley
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/bkelley/
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
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