Backup Software

Hi

We are getting ready to rollout a new system in the next few months and I have started to look at backup and recovery strategies for SQL Server 2005 on which this new system will be housed. The proposal is to by Veritas Backup Exec with the server this system will be housed on however my knowledge is "limited" to the backup and restore options available directly from SQL. I have been unable to find any opinion on using third party software to backup and restore SQL Server 2005 databases.

Can anyone help to give me an objective opinion on this subject. Should I simply use SQL Server and the tools it ships with or do these third-party applications make it easier?

Many thanks in advance of your help

Cheers

Danny

I find that using SQL's built in backup facility, backing up to a local drive, and then having a third party network backup product to move the backup to other locations/media is often the best choice.

|||I NEVER use backup agents to directly backup my SQL Server databases. The closest that I come is using SQL Litespeed at several customers so that we can take advantage of the compression and encryption features. Beyond that, I backup to disk and then use a utilty like Backup Exec to archive my backups to tape. I've simply had way too many very bad experiences in live disasters in the past to ever do backups any other way.|||

I have used redgate sql backup. this has more compresiion ratio , passowrd protected and backup will be encrypted.

However, SQL Server native backup also work for me lot of time. it will take more time than other tools but u can work with that

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I find SQL backup still the easiest (well, it could use lots of improvements) to use

We use Maintainence Plan to backup onto network file server on RAID5 (say we keep a weekly rotation)

and future plan is to use Veritas Backup Exec to backup those .BAK files (not sure how long the rotation will be, or if it's even necessary to backup SQL BAK files onto tape)

We did try Veritas SQL Agent as well, but due to network issues that's been halted for now

It wasn't too bad to use

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Backing-up to disk, using either SQL Server's native backups or a third-party backup tool, then backing-up from disk to tape is a great way to go if you have a sufficient time window. If you plan your backup regime properly you can keep several days' backups on disk and backup only the most recent backups to tape on a daily basis. This approach is beneficial when someone asks for a copy of a particular database from several days ago as you don't have to mess around recalling tapes etc...

Whether to use SQL Server's native backups or, instead, a third-party tool, such as Quest's SQL Litespeed or Red-Gate's SQL Backup, depends on whether you need to minimise the storage requirements of your backups and/or if you need to reduce the time taken to create the backup files. For instance, if you have only a couple of databases each of, say, 1GB in size then it probably isn't going to be worth investing in a third-party tool. If, on the otherhand, you have databases of, say, 200GB in size and you're backing-up to disk across a network then you'll probably see significant reductions in both backup file sizes and backup times if you use a third-party product that is capable of compression.

We use either SQL Server backups or SQL Litespeed backups, scheduled by SQL Agent, depending on the sizes of the databases on our servers - the decision is made on a server-by-server basis. We then use Backup Exec to backup the resultant backup files to tape. I must admit that I've never used Backup Exec to backup data straight from SQL Server, however to me it just doesn't 'feel' right doing it that way - anyway we're happy with the solution that we use so there's no need to change it. One other thing is that we've been using SQL Litespeed for around three years and performed literally hundreds of test restores and we have never had problems restoring databases from the compressed files (and, no, I don't work for Quest... ;) ).

Chris

|||Thank you all for your updates, most helpful!!!|||

The easiest way for me is to use a sql server backup program. The one I reccomend is www.4backuponline.com it will let you have a local copy and an online copy of you backup and it's really simple to use. You set it up once and choose when to run backups and it will run automatically and send daily emails with backup status.

I hope it helps,

|||I always do a quick backup of my project using Developer's Backup.|||

I do know that sqlbase a tape is not "allowed" to be ran over the database.

This is not the same situation for sql is it?