Question

Without not reason, I lose all my data in my database. Fortunately this was just test data, but this made me to think what will happen if this was done with a production db.

Ultimately, every developer got a db problem and want to rollback the db. We don’t do things to protect the db, as we think its a DBA work, but then we got into trouble…

What are your backup best practices?

Answer 1

Since all the developers are also the DBAs where I work, we’re collectively responsible for our backup strategy as well – if you care about the data, make sure you’re at least informed about how the backups work, even if you’re not part of the actual decisions.

The VERY first thing I do (before I even have any databases set up) is set up nightly maintenance plans that include a full backup, and direct those backups to a central network share on a different computer (our NAS). At the very least, for the love of your job, don’t put the backups on the same physical storage that your database files sit on. What good are backups if you lose them at the same time you lose the disk?

We don’t do point-in-time restores, so we don’t do log backups (all our databases are set to Simple recovery mode), but if you want logs backed up, make sure you include those as well, as an acceptable interval as well.

On a side note, SQL 2008 supports compressed backups, which speeds up backup time considerably and makes the files much, much smaller – I can’t think of an instance where you wouldn’t want to use this option. I’d love to hear one, though, and I’m willing to reconsider!