SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive
manual backups will break Veritas differentials
I had a bad data disaster recently. When we went to restore from tape, we found that the full backup worked and some of the differentials worked, but they failed midweek. I googled the error message from Veritas BackupExec and found this page: http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/275542.htm This error will occur during a differential restore of a SQL 2000 Database using the Backup Exec ™ SQL Agent if the Log Sequence Number (LSN) does not match the LSN of the backup set used for the full database restore performed initially. I interpret this to mean that if you have a Veritas backup strategy in place that does weekly full and daily incremental and then, midweek, as a safety precaution or to set up log shipping, you do a full backup of your databases, you will break your tape backup strategy. Is this true? How do real-world DBAs work in this environment? I thought rule #1 was to always do a backup as a precaution before doing anything that might mess up the database. And using Veritas/tapes for all backups is impractical when full backups take hours to run and burn through a whole tape in the DLT.Hi Dave,
This sounds right to me…i guess if you do a full backup mid-week, all the differential backups done after this will work if applied to the mid-week backup, not the automated weekly one, so you would need to use the mid week backup as your starting point…
quote:Originally posted by daveatkins
I interpret this to mean that if you have a Veritas backup strategy in place that does weekly full and daily incremental and then, midweek, as a safety precaution or to set up log shipping, you do a full backup of your databases, you will break your tape backup strategy.
I interpret this to mean that if you have a Veritas backup strategy in place that does weekly full and daily incremental and then, midweek, as a safety precaution or to set up log shipping, you do a full backup of your databases, you will break your tape backup strategy.
If the DLT is not meeting your solutions (it didn’t meet ours), then look at SDLT. The bottom line is that if you use that strategy and do a mid-week full for some reason, that mid-week full has to get moved to tape and documented somehow so you can recover. For this reason, I prefer to let SQL do my backups. Veritas just grabs whatever I put in the appropriate folders. It gives me more flexibility because I can just put any mid-weeks into the folder to pick up as needed. MeanOldDBA
[email protected] When life gives you a lemon, fire the DBA.
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