Introduction

Backup and recovery procedures are essential to every organization, especially those employing central database systems. Recovering from system failure or user error can mean the difference between a business inconvenience and a profit loss! SQL Server 2000 offers several backup methods and media storage options that will allow you to implement a backup strategy that works within your organization.

Via support for snapshot backup and recovery options, performing online backups while minimizing the impact on server performance is essential for the 24 x 7 availability required in many e-commerce and multinational organizations. For large database backups, using multiple backup devices can speed the backup process and increase system availability. Combined with backup verification and scheduling capabilities in SQL Server, your data can be secure and available for recovery in case your database server is not.

This chapter reviews the SQL Server backup models as well as the steps to planning and implementing a backup and recovery strategy. You will perform a backup and restore procedure using the Backup Wizard and T-SQL statements. The end of this chapter reviews developing an ongoing test strategy to ensure that your backup procedures are accurate and can be implemented in a disaster recovery situation.

Planning and Implementing a Successful Backup and Recovery Strategy

The importance of a thorough and practiced database backup and recovery strategy will become evident the first time you need to implement your recovery procedures in other words, the first time your server goes down and you lose your database. A...