Backup Options - low disk space

Howdy,

We have very a tight limit on disk space for backups.

We have a 3 GB db that we do full a weekly full backup on, followed by hourly tran log backups for the rest of the week - this adds up to a LOT of disk space usage ( we cant do differential backups due to space limitations, as diffs are almost 3 GB in size... ).
As disk space is limited, we can only keep a weeks worth of backups on the disk, and previous weeks get backed up onto tape. No big deal there....

So, when weekly full backup occurs, the only way to recover the previous weeks data is to restore previous full backup & allpy the required number of tran logs.

Is there another way to do backups perhaps using file backups , so we dont have to go all the way back to the previous weeks backups?

Thanks in advance,

SG.Do you have a tape device on the machine? If so you could copy the backup off every night and run a full backup every night...if this is an important server, buy more disks!! I bought an external 80gb drive for $90, I would push back and have the company buy more space.

HTH|||Hi,

Thanks - I have suggested to the clients the disk space option is the best way of going, I just wanted someone else to say it too. I figure its not worth the grief for skimping on disk space for the sake of operational integrity.

Cheers

SG|||Hi,
If you haven't yet bought hard disk, you could do this. You could schedule the full backups daily and 'overwrite the existing media' instead of appending. Also you can delete the transactional log after the successful backup at the end of the day.
You could continue with the weekly tape backups too. If you need to restore, you need to the full with no recovery and the tran log for just the previous day. Ofcourse if the restoration is beyond a days time, you will need to use the tape, previous days full backup and transaction logs.

Hope this help you.

Regards,

Backup n Restore Question (How to see a backup media content by TSQL?)

Hello, Howdy?

I got a question on backup and restore. I wanna know how to retrive the information about a backup media content by TSQL. we can see all the the information about that thing with SQL Management studio just by a few clicks, however, i wanna do that in code.

answeres are appreciated.....

thank u.

Hi, there is an option is RESTORE DATABASE which is called FILELIST ONLY, for more Information look in the BOL under RESTORE DATABASE:

"The RESTORE FILELISTONLY statement is used to determine the number and names of the files in the database being restored. "

HTH, Jens Suessmeyer.

|||HELLO JENS,
thank you for your response,
I got what u meant, that thing which you told me is about obtaining the information in a file on backup device, for example like this:
RESTORE FILELISTONLY FROM backup_device WITH FILE=3
but i don't want this, as u know every backup device is composed of several backups that have been taken earlier, each of them has a name, type, component, server,..... that you can see in the media content of a backup device in sql managament 2005 console.(Server Objects/Backup Device)
for example in the media content you can see this one:
2/16/2006 11:20 AM Database Full CSVBP\KARIMIPOUR liver_institute 1 2/16/2006 11:20:55 AM
as the orange section is the name of the back up that i have taken earlier. I want this. The name of the backups to show to the user. So the user can decide which backup to restore. cause the users don't have access to SQL, they don't know which backup to restore.....so I wanna give em some information about the name of which backup to restore.
Thanks

|||Hello
I solved my problem, we can find the name and description of taken backups in any backup device in the BACKUPSET table in MSDB database.
Have fun.