I'm using Microsoft SQL server and storing lot of data daily. I'm taking full backup daily which takes more than 5 hours to complete. Is there any idea to complete my backup process within a hour ? An alternative things to do?
Daily differential backup (only changes will be backed up) and CloudBerry software will make you deal:)
Definitely consider taking differential backups. Depending on how much data is changing you may be able to take differential backups every hour or so, giving you a quick way to restore the hourly backup if needed. Perhaps complete a full backup once a week or every few days.
There are several considerations and I suggest you research it well to see if it will meet your specific needs, for example (source):
If your databases are small or compress effectively enough so that your full and transaction log backups fall within storage and SLA limits, differential backups are unnecessary.
If your databases change a lot between backups, you might as well perform full backups.
If the changes to your database are few and the transaction log backups would take longer to restore than the differential backups, using differential backups might make sense and are worth investigating.
Other things to consider:
Are you currently taking transaction log backups? Should you be? What recovery model are you using?
If you decide to do differential backups, be aware of things such as the "Copy only backup" option in SQL Server Management Studio. These have implications for restoring data in a disaster recovery situation.
In essence, you should educate yourself on SQL Server backup and restore before you make any changes.
To improve the situation and to speed the backup you may consider differential and transaction log backups. You can do it through the studio, but to schedule it you will have to refer to a 3-rd party tool like CloudBerry.
The alternate to taking full backups daily is taking incremental/ progressive incremental or reverse incremental backups.
An incremental backup copies the changes only from the last successful backups.
Progressive incremental has only on one full backup copy for the servers and takes incremental backups for the rest of cycle.
Reverse incremental supported by Veeam and DPM has its own mechanism to backup and store only incremental copies from the server, and store each copy as a full copy which allows quick restoration in case of disasters.
To configure this kind of backups, you can go for any enterprise level backup tool, but if you focus on cost effectiveness I would recommend Cloudberry backup.
I tried CloudBerry Cross-Platform Cloud Backup which provides a simple GUI to manage backup and restores and cloud storage account comes bundled with the software.You can also use the cloudberry explorer to view, move and manage your data on the cloud storage account.
It also provides enterprise backup features like job scheduling, CLI, compression and encryption.
Related
I have SQL Server 2012, and a Backup drive apart, but it is really full. I want to move all the backups, after done, to a Network Drive. My concern is with the differential and log backups, as I don't know if they need to see the full backup to be done, or how does it works in SQL Server.
Is it safe to move the Full Backup to another drive, and then execute the daily differential backups?
Let us remember the golden rule for restoring first.
‘After restoring full database backup, restore latest differential database backup and all the transaction log backup after that to get database to current state.’
So if you have only one full backup and then keep on taking differential backup's the size of the differential backup will keep on growing everyday. In case of disaster you may have to find the older full backup and then restore the latest differential backup.
So in theory: If you take one full backup and move to somewhere else and keep on taking differential backup works.
However, there are changes that your full backup may get corrupted or your differential backup have issues. You will in that case miss another full backup.
It is always a good idea to take full backup at regular intervals. I take full backup of my databases every day when they are relatively small and every other day when they are very large.
Here is the blog post where I have written about backup timeline.
https://blog.sqlauthority.com/2009/07/14/sql-server-backup-timeline-and-understanding-of-database-restore-process-in-full-recovery-model/
To answer the question you asked, the SQL Server doesn't access the full backup itself when it makes differential and log backups. It instead keeps track of what needs to be backed up in the database itself.
The short version of that for differential backups is "the notion of what's changed (and therefore needs to be backed up) is kept track of in what are called differential change map pages" and for log backup is "the notion of what's changed (and therefore needs to be backed up) is kept track of in the transaction log itself".
The longer (and IMO more interesting) version is this excellent article by Paul Randal.
To recover, you need to restore the full backup before the differential. The normal recovery sequence is to restore the latest full backup, latest differential backup after the full backup, and log backups since the differential in sequence.
The backup files obviously need to be available in order to restore regardless of where you store them. If you were to lose the local full backup, you could not restore at all. You might consider copying the full backup to the network share as an extra layer of safety.
I have been building an application to Backup SQL Databases using VDI using SMO.
I have a doubt whether i should be capturing the last backup time of a database along with the LSN or simply, just capture the LSN.
More precisely, i wanted to take Last Backup Time to know that if end-user is using another software to backup their SQL DB's using Copy-only method since copy-only method doesn't update LSN or truncate anything but does update the Last backup time.
So, if i am ignoring the last backup time information of any DB and simply capturing the LSN, is it going to cause any problems for me? in terms of recovery/backup if there are other 3rd party softwares into play?
:::: Edit :::::
I am a backup application developer and i would like to know, should i be capturing the Last Backup time of the database that my end-user would like to backup ? or just simply capture the LSN to maintain the Log chain?
If you're writing your backup software for the purposes of ensuring recoverability (that is you're not taking copy-only backups yourself), don't worry about any copy-only backups that have been taken by others. As you've said, copy-only backups don't affect the backup chain.
The only thing that would mess you up is if someone else is taking a non-copy-only backup interleaved with yours. In that case, you could get into a situation where one of their backups relies on one of yours (or vice versa) and the restore scenario is complicated at a point where it really shouldn't be (i.e. the database is down and you need to recover it).
I have to take a Production SQL Database backup (Full Backup ) while the connection is on and transaction is happening. Does it affect any transactions. Do they maintain any transaction isolation levels ??
Not a development question.
Backups are transactional integer and will contain the transactions closed at the time of backup. ALl new / open transaction during the backup will be in the transaction log and not in the backup.
Database servers are not written by mediocre developers and the specialists know that backups are of paramount integrity. And like usual for high level products they write good documentation which - one can acutally read.
Technet magazine had a simple explanation for the different backup strategies; for Full Backup it starts out with:
"A full database backup provides a complete copy of the database and provides a single point-in-time to which the database can be restored. Even though it may take many hours for the backup process to run, you can still only restore the backup to a single point (effectively at the end of the backup, but I'll discuss exactly what that point is later in this article). A full backup does not allow recovery to any point in time while the backup was running. This is also the same for differential backups."
Your users will be able to use the application subject to the server having the disk / memory resources to carry on running whilst the backup is processed.
I manage a web application for a client with the following specs:
ASP.net 3.5 running on a Virtual Windows 2003 Web Server
SQL Server Standard hosting the database
Database current size of 6Gb, with 1Gb/month growth rate
One single table is responsible for 98% of the size, holds the most critical data for the client
Log is not kept for this big table, only selects are done in this table
50 Gb FTP space avaiable for backup
Considering this scenario, what would be the best strategy for a SQL Backup and what tool would be best suited for this task (commercial applications included, client can pay for the license fee)?
Here is the strategy we use for CodePlex.com:
All SQL servers run with a peer server using SQL mirroring
Weekly full backup (stored on separate drive from databases)
Daily differential backup (stored on separate drive from databases)
Transaction log backup every 5 minutes (stored on separate drive from databases)
Daily tape backup
Tape backups taken offsite weekly
Also very important test your backups! Studies have shown that over 30% of untested backup procedures are flawed. Here is our backup testing strategy:
Every 30 minutes verify the full backup file exists (using scheduled task)
Every 30 minutes verify the differential backup file exists (using scheduled task)
Every 30 minutes verify the transaction log backup file exists (using scheduled task)
Every 30 minutes verify the database mirroring is configured (using scheduled task)
Every day, do a test restore of the full+differential backup and report the table row counts (using scheduled task)
Once a month do a test restore of the most recent tape backup and verify the data
It depends how critical is the data. Here is however how I i'd do it.
1. Run a full backup every day.
2. Run a differential backup every 4 hours.
3. Run a transactional log backup every 15 minutes
4. Keep a copy at the site and move a copy off the site as well as soon as the backup is done.
The database is not too big, and this is easily doable.
Use a third party tool like Redgate SQL Backup and it will automatically compress and encrypt the database backup for you. I have used it extensively and am a big fan.
Additionally if you another site available, and the data is very critical, you might want to think about setting up log shipping as well.
This is a VPC? Can you install apps?
http://www.jungledisk.com/
That's what we use - make a sql job that pushes out a backup every day, then use that service to push a copy back to Amazons S3 service. If not maybe you could have a local app that pulls the backup to a machine then pushes it /w S3 webservice, or still using Jungledisk.
This is important! If your app goes down it hurts! Also make sure you backup your deployed app and resources stored there... i.e. uploaded content to your apps storage directory.
I was supposed to type in my answer to your question but I realized there are lots of far greater resources somewhere like this article in SQLServerCentral.com. You can also find lots of "Best Practices on Backup" like this one.
You might also want to take into consideration how much data you can afford to lose and how long it will take you to restore the database. Your client may decide that they never want to lose more than 15 minutes of data ever, or they may decide that losing up to a days worth of data is okay with them.
I want to implement an automated backup system for my site's SQL Server 2005 DB that will backup nightly to Amazon's S3 service. But since S3 charges both for space and bandwidth used, I would like to minimize the size of the files that I transfer in. What is the best way to achieve this?
I should clarify that I'm not really talking so much about compression, which is pretty straightforward, but concerning backup strategies like whether to do differential backups all the time, whether I need to copy transaction logs, etc.
Differential backups will be smaller than full backups, of course. However, you should consider the restoration side as well. You'll need your last full backup as well as your differentials to perform the restore which can add up to a lot of bandwidth/transfer time for a restore. One option is to perform a full backup weekly and do differentials daily (or a similar type of schedule).
As for transaction logs, it depends on what granularity you're looking for in restoring your data. If restoring to the last full or differential backup is sufficient, then you don't need to worry about taking transaction log backups. If that's not the case, then transaction log backups will be necessary.
Either use a commercial product do compress the backups like Red Gate Backup Pro or just zip-compress it after you're done.
Write a .batch script or powershell script that will find the file/s created in the past day and zip them up. Then FTP or whatever you have to do.
A powershell example that I just came across.