Question

I’m looking for best practices, efficient way. I need to copy once per month my production database to development. So I’m thinking to automate this process if possible.

The size of database around 20GB with log file (full recovery mode).

Please let me know if I need to provide more details.

Answer 1

Hopefully you’re making regular backups of your database anyway.
So you basically just need to take the newest backup and restore it on a different server (and maybe with a different database name).

At my workplace, we are using MS SQL Server and we are doing this as well:
Our main database is backed up every evening at 9 pm (full backup).
Every day at 11 pm, a SQL Server Agent job on another server takes the newest backup from the backup folder and restores it as OurMainDatabase_Yesterday.

Here is an example script for MS SQL Server:

ALTER DATABASE OurMainDatabase_Yesterday SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

USE master

EXEC sp_detach_db 'OurMainDatabase_Yesterday', 'true'

-- use today's backup from the main server
declare @BackupPath as nvarchar(500)
set @BackupPath = '\\MainServer\backup\OurMainDatabase\OurMainDatabase_backup_' 
    + convert(varchar(10),getdate(),112) + '2100.BAK'

RESTORE DATABASE OurMainDatabase_Yesterday
   FROM DISK = @BackupPath
   WITH MOVE 'OurMainDatabase_Data' 
     TO 'F:\Data\OurMainDatabase_Yesterday_Data.mdf',
   MOVE 'OurMainDatabase_Log' 
     TO 'G:\Logs\OurMainDatabase_Yesterday_Log.ldf',
   REPLACE

ALTER DATABASE OurMainDatabase_Yesterday SET MULTI_USER