If you really want a good fallback plan, the gold standard is a drive image; whether that's a vRanger backup of a VMWare VM, or a Paragon/Acronis TrueImage/DD/Clonezilla/Norton Ghost image...

These articles can almost always be simplified into:

"Great" (i.e. highly productive, effective workers who produce great results) <worker types> do:

Business goal analysis

Root cause analysis

Current and Future contingency analysis

Lessons learned analysis

......

You can use Truecrypt full (system) disk encryption on Windows partitions, and the built-in LUKS encryption on Linux partitions, both of which work well.

For USB sticks, data written to external...

To start with, here's an example of a .7z compression command line might be:

7z a -t7z -mx1 -m0=LZMA2 -mmt8 -ssw -bd -y -pPassword -r My7zFile.7z "C:\test\*"

-t7z means use 7z file...

You may or may not also want to alter this to in "change IP address of old server to newly assigned IP, change IP address of new server to be...

For the AD user running the SQL Server service and/or the SQL Server Agent service and/or the SQL Server proxy user:

1) NOT an administrator! Just a regular user.

2) Group...

If by "SSL Encryption", you mean encryption of TCP connection to the SQL Server instance, then you'll need to generate a certificate using the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) (I...

Do you keep data that's not up to date, like former clients, perhaps?

If so, you will likely eventually find phone numbers being re-used, either quickly, or slowly.

Also, wouldn't it be...

sql-lover (5/10/2013)

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homebrew01 (5/10/2013)

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Bigger picture: Propose to management that a reporting database be created and updated (preferably on a different server) and let users query against that database instead. Still not...

Jeff Moden (5/6/2013)

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IF your server storage is on a SAN and the main server and the reporting server are on the same SAN, ask the SAN folks if they could...

Ask how an antivirus running on the host is going to catch malware running inside a guest? If you get a reasonable sounding answer, ask for a test to...

For those using a "real" version control system: When was the last time you tested a restore of one of your CVS backups?

CVS is an interesting choice in many shops...

By "sp_whoisactive", we most often mean Adam Machanic's stored procedure:

http://sqlblog.com/files/default.aspx - current version is 11.11.

You can also run sp_who2 and save the output, run it again, and see the difference...

Think of RecoverPoint's...

Which database and log files are being replicated?

Was the replication up to date on all of them, or was it behind on some of the LUNs?

In our testing,...