I love baseball, and I play every summer with a bunch of other old guys in Denver. Now baseball is a game of numbers and statistics and to me, one of the amazing things about baseball is that if you're successful as a hitter 1/3 of the time, you're a success. In fact, if you're a .300 career hitter, you have a good chance of getting to the Hall of Fame. If you're interested, the all-time, career batting leader is Ty Cobb at .366 and they fall off quickly from there.
I saw a posting recently from someone that said they were testing their Sharepoint restore, including the database, and were successful only 30% of the time in getting the portal working. In the DR world, I'd think that's pretty bad.
I've restored probably thousands of databases in my career. And rarely have I had them not work. Granted I haven't always had to restore a complete application, but I have had some success in those areas as well.
One of the recommended practices is that you periodically practice your restores. And not just the skill of restoring a database, but actually restore your production backups, from the long term storage (tape or disk). This is to ensure that you get back a working database. This is to ensure that you can not only perform the process, but that your entire set of hardware and media is working correctly and that you don't have any fundamental errors in your database.
Just because your backup job completes without error doesn't mean you'll get the data back. You never know when your tape drive isn't working, you have corruption in the database, or some other problem in the entire process.
There are people that recommend you restore every single backup. Meaning take every backup, every day, off tape, and restore to another server. I don't know about you, but that's a lot of work in my mind. But you should regularly, meaning on a schedule, a fixed period, a period of no more than a month, check restores on all your major databases.
It's good practice, and who know what you'll find. Stop for a minute and think: when's the last time you restored a backup of your production database?
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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