Backup timings - Best practise

  • Hi folks

    Have a question regarding the best practise for scheduling the SQL backups on an SQL 2000 named instance server. 4 Cpu's.

    Developer wants to backup all databases at the same time each night. The databases sizes are 500 MB , 20 MB and 15 MB.

    Have set it up as required , and jobs all run fine.

    However my question is , is this good practise , or should I try to change the schedules. If it is best can to change to a different scedule can anyone supply some reasons for making the change.

    Many thanks for any help given.

     

  • You can always schedule it to run at different intervals. However, since your database size is not very large, it must be happening in few minutes.

    Once the database size grows, you might want to replan to run all  at different times. At present, I dont see any harm in run all 3 at the same time.

    --Kishore

  • If you are doing the restores at the same time so that they will be synched up in case of a restore you may need to rethink things a bit.  Right now your databases are tiny, but even with small databases you will not achieve synchronization unless you bring the entire system down (cut off all user access) during the backup window.  This approach also limits you restoring only from your nightly full backups so you risk losing as much as a days worth of work.

    A better and more scalable approach is to make sure that the databases are in full recovery mode.  That way any database (or all of them) can be restored to any point in time.

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    If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this. -Friedrich August von Hayek

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  • System may get hang when the size of the DB's get large.It is better to schedule it at different time according to server load.In your case now DB size is small and can schedule very easily.

  • Thanks everyone for all the advice.

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