SQL question

[joshgfeller]

Hello,

On our main SQL server I do full backups nightly, differential at noon, and trans logs throughout the day all via windows sql agent. When I setup Veeam I went ahead and turned on application processing. I noticed when doing a restore on SQL in windows my backup chain seemed messed up and it was trying to pull the full backup with a Veeam name on the backup so it wouldn't work.

Is best practices in my scenario to let windows handle all the SQL backups and then turn off application processing on the DB server?

[kubimike]

No let application aware do it's thing. Could you post a pic of the error ?

[joshgfeller]

I will pull a screenshot in the morning . So veeam should be able to take a full sql backup in the evenings and not mess up the backup chain? So I can let veeam handle the full nightly, turn off full sql full backup in windows, and let windows sql handle differential and trans logs?

[kubimike]

If you're doing windows sql backup and veeam sql backup that's going to cause an issue with log rolling. what's your logging plan ? Simple ? Full?

[joshgfeller]

Hello we use full with transaction log backups every 15 minutes. However Now that I've done some more research I didn't realize that veeam could backup transaction logs frequently. I thought you only had the database restore from the image backup. Now that I see veeam has the transaction log backups with point in time recovery it seems maybe the best solution is rely completely on veeam for full and trans log backups and ditch sql server agent backups entirely ?

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Josh,

Veeam can (for example) take an image-level backup every day (or every 12 hours depending on your needs) and then every x minutes ship the logs. Truncation will happen when you do the image-level backup and with application aware processing veeam will take care of it.

As @Kubimike said, having different solutions doing backups and allowing them to play with the logs really can mess thing up and you will end up with broken things in the end. So you want to avoid that. You are going to have to make the call which solution is allowed to work with the logs. I'm certainly not going to try to convince you to choose for Veeam, but I am going to ask you to look at our SQL explorer (https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95) and I hope you will see that you are going to get a very powerful restore tool (and that is the reason why we backup right )

If you have a DBA, I am sure he is going to like this also

Let us know what you think and don't hesitate to ask more questions.

Cheers
Mike

[joshgfeller]

Hello, I think I will give veeam a try on transaction logs and disable sql server agent backups. A couple more questions:

1. Can you define which databases on the DB server get trans logs backed up? Or is it simply by which DB's are in the full recovery model?


2. Sometimes we restore from backup to the SAME server with a DIFFERENT db name and file names for application testing. Can veeam do this restore while writing over the test database or do you have to delete it first?

[kubimike]

@josh, any DB thats not set to simple will get backed up. Veeam can do this when doing a restore select "Other Server" pick the same server, then you can rename.

[foggy]

You can also specify database exclusions, if required.