Please start any new threads on our new site at https://forums.sqlteam.com. We've got lots of great SQL Server experts to answer whatever question you can come up with.

 All Forums
 SQL Server 2008 Forums
 SQL Server Administration (2008)
 Backup strategy to choose

Author  Topic 

rajsin
Starting Member

4 Posts

Posted - 2014-04-10 : 04:38:43
hello friends,

i have a sql server 2008 standard edition installed on a virtual server. This is our production Data warehouse server. This server is being backed up everyday in the evening (virtual backup). This is a data warehouse DB server which is 1TB in size have 5 DB's in total.

Given that we do virtual backups everyday do we also need individual database backups?

What will be the advantage of having individual database backup compared to complete virtual server backup?

This is not OLTP but OLAP purpose database.

Thanks

rajsin

Bustaz Kool
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

1834 Posts

Posted - 2014-04-16 : 18:48:03
Under your current configuration, if anything goes wrong, you'll need to restore the virtual image. Any changes made will be lost. In an OLAP this might be an acceptable risk. Let's look at the example of a single database going bad and needing to be restored. In your current configuration, you'll restore the image from last night. Any refreshes to the other four databases are lost. Part of "restoring" includes re-loading any data changes to the other four databases. Implied in this remembering to do this and the ability to know which data changes may have occurred. You'd also, of course, be offline for all databases until the re-image was complete. If you can live with that risk, you may have an acceptable approach.

If, on the other hand, you had individual database backups, you'd only need to restore a single database and re-load any data changes in that database. The other four databases would remain online and available.

===============================================================================
“Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.”
-Alain de Botton
Go to Top of Page
   

- Advertisement -