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 SQL Server 2005 Full/Differential Backup Issues

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idxtb
Starting Member

1 Post

Posted - 2007-06-29 : 03:22:47
Hi,

After some advice - I have a SQL Server 2005 database which is part
of an anti-virus setup. The main database is 25Gb is size, and it
is running in simple recovery mode. There are two backup jobs in
place, one to do a differential backup each Mon-Sat, and one to
do a full backup on Sun. Although the backups do get done they
are taking 5 hours to do. Any wiz out there care to suggest what
the problem is, I would've though that maybe an hour was more
acceptable ?

Cheers,

Gordon

Kristen
Test

22859 Posts

Posted - 2007-06-29 : 04:06:51
"Any wiz out there care to suggest what the problem is"

Well, a full backup may take a while. And a Differential Backup will take a while if a high percentage of the database changes - how dot eh size of the Full and Differential Backup files compare? If the differential backup file is, say, more than 50% the size of the Full backup it would probably be better to do Full Backups.

The anti-virus may well be causing problems ...

... and if the server is very heavily used, that may be slowing down the backup too. Although presumably the backup is happening at a "quiet" time during the night? If so I would suspect the anti-virus software being set up wrongly, or running a virus scan at the same time as the backup is running.

Kristen
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nr
SQLTeam MVY

12543 Posts

Posted - 2007-06-29 : 05:17:09
If you have a batch job that changes a lot of rows the next diff will be large - and so will all diffs up to the the next full backup.
You need to take a full after any large batch jobs. So if you do a lot every night then diffs probably aren't worthwhile.

There are things yo can do to speed up the backups probably - make sure it's to a different disk, partition the data to read only and updatable, stripe the backups across drives, change your database/process design so that less pages are changed,use a 3rd party backup utility that compresses the data but first of all look at what is being backed up and what you are backing up.

==========================================
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DTS can be used in a similar way.
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