BACKUP DATABASE

Moving a Sharepoint Site Between Farms With Different Templates

A client came to be with a pretty scary problem.  Their SharePoint site was totally down.  The databases were there but the actual SharePoint farm was totally dead.  All of the SharePoint tools said that the farm wasn't configured yet so there were some pretty big problems.  Thankfully they had...

Backup Databases on Creation

One of the companies which I work with has the occasion to create new databases when they do releases of their software.  Normally this isn't a problem, except that they are setup to use maintenance plans to handle the backup and pruning of their transaction logs.  As all the new databases are...

If you aren’t doing backups, you aren’t doing your job.

Apparently people still haven't figured out that taking backups of SQL Server databases is actually a requirement of having a SQL Server database.  There was a conversation recently on Twitter about yet another forum question where the OP talked about the crashed database that they had without any...

If you are going to provide SQL Server support, you should probably know what you are doing.

So the other day I got a ticket opened by my companies Managed Service Provider.  There was a backup failure on one of our databases.  The response from the hosting provider was:

This failed due to a "Error: 3041, Severity: 16, State: 1." error. This is because you...
			

Taking backups is good, but testing them is better.

I bet that if asked when the last time the database backup was taken and if it succeeded you would know off of the top of your head when that was.  But if I asked you when the last time your database was restored successfully would you know?

Learn to use the COPY_ONLY flag for one off backups

Taking a full backup when doing major database upgrades is a great idea.  However if you are taking differential backups this one off full backup will break the differential backup chain.

Back to Basics: The BACKUP DATABASE command

Now that you have objects created within your database, and data within the tables you need to secure your database in case of a server failure or accidental data deletion.  This would be done by taking backups of the database.  Backups are taken by using the BACKUP DATABASE command. The...