Recovery and Backups for Beginners

Mike Hillwig

Boston, MA

5/31/13 | Footer Goes Here1 |

Mike Hillwig

SQL Server DBA Working with SQL Server since SQL 7 Senior DBA at hosting division of a financial software

company owned by a large financial institution Resume includes Acme Packet Oracle, Shawmut Design

and Construction, Equitable Resources Certified in ITIL Foundations

Mike Hillwig

Owned by Two Pugs Avid Cook Lover of Blue Cheese And Bacon Geek at Heart

Obligatory Social Networking Slide

mikehillwig.com sqlserverpedia.com twitter.com/mikehillwig anysocialnetworkingsite/mikehillwig

Housekeeping

Slides and scripts at sqlsaturday.com Blog post at mikehillwig.com/go/recovery Don’t let me talk too fast

Beware of the Blogs

There is some amazing advice out there. But…

Anybody can put bad advice on the internet

Trust people you know

Assume I’m an idiot I don’t trust people who

say “ALWAYS” or “NEVER”

Test everything in your own test environment first.

Lets talk strategy

Who has a backup strategy? Do you have a recovery strategy?

If you have a backup strategy and not a recovery strategy, you're doing it wrong!

Lets talk business

SLA: Service Level Agreements (with your customers)

OLA: Operational Level Agreements (with your organization)

RTO: how quickly you need to be recovered (usually in hours) after a failure

RPO: how much data loss (usually in minutes) is acceptable

The lower your RTO and RPO, the greater the cost.

Myth Busting

Backup and Recovery are NOT the same thing as high availability.

High Availability (Clustering, Always On) are a completely different topic.

Log Shipping is another topic for another day.

Recovery Models

Simple Recovery – Allows us to restore a full backup.

Full Recovery Allows us to restore a full backup Then roll forward transaction log backups Stop at a specific point in time

BULK LOGGED – Similar to Full Recovery, but we’re not talking about it today.

What is the right Recovery Model to Use?

It depends on your RPO It also depends on your data and business

processes

Why RPO Matters

Does your RPO allow you to lose the data between full backups?

Probably not. But it can happen.

Why Your Data and Business Matters

How many of your databases have data that doesn’t change between full backups?

Can your data be recreated from import files or re-running a process to run data updates?

Matching Recovery Models to Backups

SIMPLE: Regular FULL backups FULL:

Regular FULL backups AND frequent transaction log backups How frequent? It depends on your RPO.

A Word on Log Shipping

Another form of Backup and Recovery Three Step Process

Backup Transaction Logs Copies Transaction Log Backups to Target Restores Transaction Log Backups on Target

Very helpful for Disaster Recovery

Had enough theory?

Let’s Demo

If you have a backup strategy and not a recovery strategy, you're doing it wrong!

Wrap Up

Slides and blog post at mikehillwig.com/go/recovery

Questions?