Francisco Tapia
fhtapia at gmail.com
Sat Feb 25 11:02:52 CST 2012
John, This is a topic that I recommend a lot of research on, there is a great article over on simple-talk about database balkups, this article covers 2005, but about the biggest difference between 2005 and 2008 is that the WITH TRUNCATEONLY option has been removed. http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/backup-and-recovery/sql-server-2005-backups/ When in Full recovery mode, you would have 3 different backups depending on the size of your database; so FULL backup, Differential, and Log backup. To recover you recover the full backup, followed by the last differential, and finally every log backup since the last differential -Francisco http://bit.ly/sqlthis | Tsql and More... <http://db.tt/JeXURAx> On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 08:46, jwcolby <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> wrote: > How does an incremental database backup work? I kinda have a picture in > my head, only the changed stuff is backed up, to the same file (maybe?) and > so forth. Not even sure if that is true. > > What about restores from? Is the entire thing restored? Only changes > from a specific date / time? > > My client will never have more than my expertise (which is scary) so I > need to get a handle on this. > > ATM they are backing up the entire thing every night using "windows > backup", but I doubt that they are testing restores. I have found some > scripts that seem to do a good job (though how would I know?) here: > > http://ola.hallengren.com/**downloads.html<http://ola.hallengren.com/downloads.html> > > I have built them up in a _DISMaster database where I keep such things. I > actually ran them and got a full backup of every user database (that is > what I specified to the SP) in the default backup location in a directory > structure that this script builds if necessary. > > It looks like this thing could be the basis for a backup strategy, but I > need to know more about restores specifically. > > The client is a call center for insurance claims. The entire company is > about 50-60 people with about 25 people in the database all day. > > The data was going into Access MDB backends but we are moving towards SQL > Server backends. They work all day adding / modifying data. I would like > to be able to do a "point in time" kind of restore in case of disaster. > AFAICT that means that I have to do a backup every N minutes / hours or > something like that in order to ensure that we can get back to a point in > time N minutes / hours ago. > > Am I close? As I have said many times I am not a SQL Server admin so I > need to learn enough about this specific subject to handle this aspect of > the business. > > Any advice or concise focused readings you can point me to would be very > much appreciated. > > -- > John W. Colby > Colby Consulting > > Reality is what refuses to go away > when you do not believe in it > > ______________________________**_________________ > dba-SQLServer mailing list > dba-SQLServer@**databaseadvisors.com <dba-SQLServer at databaseadvisors.com> > http://databaseadvisors.com/**mailman/listinfo/dba-sqlserver<http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-sqlserver> > http://www.databaseadvisors.**com <http://www.databaseadvisors.com> > >