It??™s easy to fall into the trap of analysis paralysis and waste precious time
debating the best action to take.
The quickest way to learn is to make a mistake. The quickest way to make a mistake
is to act based on panic. Ergo, in this particular scenario, we learned a lot.
The Scenario
I had assisted a company in setting up an effective backup scheme for its production
database. The platformwas SQL Server 2000, and the backup/restore plan specified that
we needed to restore the database quickly. Users only accessed the main application during
business hours (7 a.m. to 6 p.m.), but web-service-based processing and replication
CHAPTER 11 n DISASTER RECOVERY PLANNING 278
occurred on nearly a 24x7 basis. Due to budget constraints, no third-party tools were
available to speed the backup process, so we were left with SQL Server native backup
techniques. The databases weren??™t exceptionally large (around 30GB), so we opted for as
simple a plan as possible while achieving our base goal. After discussing the business
impact and the technical requirements, we chose the following backup scheme:
??? Full backup nightly
??? Differential backups every hour (with only the most current being kept on disk)
??? Log backups every 30 minutes
This gave us a simple scheme for the staff to follow, plus our restore scenario would
be a maximum of four restores: one full, one differential, one log backup, and one tail-log
backup.
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