Backup & recovery

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...

Moving huge amounts of data between data centers

Every once and a while I get the fun project of moving a data center from one location to another, often from a Managed Service Provider to either a CoLo facility or to another Managed Service Provider.  When I'm doing this the data sizes typically aren't small.  In the case of my current project...

Figuring out how log shipping is doing

A lot of the time when doing data center migrations or system migrations I end up using Transaction Log Shipping to get the data from one SQL Server to another.  I do this for a few reasons.

1. It's reliable.
2. It's easy to do (I've got plenty of scripts sitting around to...

Building a new CoLo – Part 1 of n

So if you follow me on twitter you might have seen this tweet a little while back.

Back To Basics: Why isn’t maintenace automatic?

One of the questions which I see pop up from time to time (especially when I used to work for a VAR that wrote software for small businesses) is why doesn't SQL Server do the maintenance automatically?  Things like checking for corruption (DBCC CHECKDB), index defragmentation, backups, etc. The...

VMware’s vCenter and SQL Server Database Backups

VMware's vCenter system uses SQL Server as it's default database platform.  One thing that needs to be looked into for a lot of VMware installations is the backup setup for the vCenter databases.  Often I find the vCenter databases configured in SIMPLE recovery.  Now this doesn't mean that the...

Cloud probably isn’t going to be a very good backup solution for you

Back on July 19th, there was a blog post that I was pointed to which talked about tossing your backup solution and using cloud for your backup instead.  Basically the points which are made are...

There’s a little something to keep in mind when restoring a SQL replication publisher

So the other day I had to restore the SQL Server replication publisher.  When I restored it I made sure to use the KEEP_REPLICATION option on the restore (also available in the SSMS UI) so replication should come back online.  However when I restarted the log reader I the following error...

How HyperBac worked for me

I recently installed HyperBac on a clients SQL Server to reduce the amount of space needed to store their backups.  Specifically we were looking to reduce the amount of space the log backups took, but I was curious to see how much space the full backups would be reduced by. The full backups...