Backups

[Matthew]

Hello All,
What methods do you use to backup your server? Do you perform backups, or just leave the clients to sort things out?

I have found that the more backups available then the more your life is made easier when something will break.

Ideally I want to jump to a SCSI Raid setup. Here in the office we had a drive die recently and the server stayed functional because the spare automatically kicked in. All I did was unplug the broken drive, put in a new drive and hit a few buttons and a little time after the new drive was restored ZERO Downtime!!!

What other methods do you take to make sure backups are done and safe?

 

[Will]

We have SQL Server log shipping on our DB servers. That's quite nifty. We log to an offsite server so we will never lose more than 5 minutes of data if the worst should happen.

 

[Matthew]

Very nice! Might have to take a look at that. I think that would be in demand by a number of clients in the hosting business.

 

[Apolo]

Hi,

Well, we recommend our customers to have a secondary HD, and we set it up as a mirror (every three days) and "booteable", for faster recoveries.

Also, all of our managed servers' customers enjoy our fully automated, off-server backup system, where we perform daily incremental backups and full backups every 7 days.

That setup has worked for both us and our customers over the years.

Regards,

Jaime

 

[monaghan]

SQL Server log shipping's not a new idea I first used it with SQL 6.5 back in late 1999 of course there was no wizard (SQL 2000) or resource kit template script (SQL 7), but it was a good TSQL coding exercise, it was reliable and saved our bacon on several occasions.

I find rsync to a remote server is a good option for normal backups.

Can't beat a good RAID card & hot swap drives with a warm spare in the drive bay combined with an alerting system so that you get a helpdesk ticket telling you that the spare's been used and you need to swap the failed drive.