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 Backups

Author  Topic 

itsonlyme4
Posting Yak Master

109 Posts

Posted - 2007-12-31 : 15:33:41

I just started a DBA Job and I am getting ready to make some recomendations for changing our Backup strategies and I was hoping to get some advice.

This is a mostly SQL Server 2000 Enterprise edition shop (all patched up to sp4) on WIN2k Servers.

They are running weekly 'TO DISK' Full Backups on all system and User Databases to a UNC path.
I just today got them to give me access to the Network Share that the Backups are getting written to - looks to be able 200gb worth of 'TO DISK' Backups using Maintenance Plans in EM.

They are also doing nightly 'TO Tape' Backups and then TLog backups to tape every 15 mins on all Databases in Full Recovery mode. I THINK they are using a Veritas SQL Agent to do the 'TO TAPE' backups but I can't be sure yet.

I would like to reverse the whole scenerio and do the nightly full and every 15 minute tlog backups to disk and then get the full backups offsite on tape everynight by backing up the network share that the backups are written to and then do weekly to tape backups if they feel they absolutely need to.

Does anyone have any suggestions about this?

tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2007-12-31 : 15:44:06
They shouldn't be backing up the databases to tape via the Veritas software at all. You should be responsible for all backups to disk. They then should be responsible for copying your backup files to tape.

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/
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itsonlyme4
Posting Yak Master

109 Posts

Posted - 2007-12-31 : 15:45:43
That is exactly what I was doing in my last shop.. now I'm just trying to figure out how much local disk space I'll need for tlog backups since they are all going to tape now.. that should be fun
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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2007-12-31 : 16:16:05
Can't you just ask the tape admins how big the file sizes are? I'd start by asking them to restore a bunch of files to ensure that the tape process works. Don't let them know that it's part of a test but rather part of a recovery.

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/
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Haywood
Posting Yak Master

221 Posts

Posted - 2007-12-31 : 17:21:53
You can get t-log backup sizes from the msdb database if the records exist. Veritas, I imagine still calls a BACKUP LOG operation which will be recorded in the history tables.

[CODE]
SELECT s.position AS [Backup Position],
LEFT(s.[description],36) AS [Backup Description],
CONVERT(VarChar(8),backup_start_date,8) AS [Start Time],
CONVERT(VarChar(8),backup_finish_date,8) AS [Finish Time],
CONVERT(NUMERIC(8,3),s.backup_size / 1024 / 1024) AS [Backup Size in MB]
FROM msdb.dbo.backupset AS s
JOIN msdb.dbo.backupmediafamily AS m
ON s.media_set_id = m.media_set_id
WHERE database_name = DB_NAME()
AND s.type = 'L'
AND CONVERT(VarChar(11),backup_start_date) = CONVERT(VarChar(11),getdate())

ORDER BY 3 ASC
[/CODE]
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itsonlyme4
Posting Yak Master

109 Posts

Posted - 2008-01-02 : 10:52:44
Awesome!!! I'll try it out!
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