Backing up SQL Server DB's

[thomasellaby]

Hi All,

Whats the general consensus on backing up SQL Servers? We are currently doing VM level backups of the SQL Server through Veeam as well as through the SQL Server Management Studio as a backup job. This seems redundant to me as we have alot more functionality doing it through Veeam and by doing the local SQL backups we are just chewing up space for no reason...

Thoughts?


Thomas

[mcrape]

I tend to clump my SQL Servers together into their own job and make sure I have SQL application aware processing turned on. This allows me to have many point in time backups (down to the transaction). I've actually used these point-in-time backups to see when specific queries have run, trying to troubleshoot other issues.

I also tend to use an in-guest backup program to backup my SQL DBs to S3 or Google Cloud. This is for longer-term retention (e.g. years) and runs twice a day.

Rarely do I need to go for the long-term backups, so Veeam with the application-aware enabled tends to do a great job.

[skrause]

Whatever method you decide to use for the database level backups (be that through SQL's native tools, or through Veeam's tools) you will want to make sure you do both a server level backup as well as doing some form of SQL backup that processes logs so you can do point-in-time restores of the databases themselves.