Backup And Restore Feature In SQL Server
For business continuity, disaster recovery plans are made that focuses on resuming the mission-critical activities as soon as possible. From a long time till now, backups are considered as a promising DRP, be it for the data saved on-premise or on Server.
In Microsoft SQL Server, a useful called Backup and Restore is being offered to users that help in saving crucial data in the database from unexpected loss. A copy of database is created that can be further saved at a location free from possible failure. In case of database corruption or database system failure, the backup can be helpful in restoring the database.
SQL Server users can prepare Disaster Recovery Plan through the Backup and Restore option. However, it is important to discover the significance of data in the database and also analyze restore requirements. For Example:
- Decide a Restore Point for the database:
- Restore database till the night before failure
- Restore database from the time close to time of failure
- What will happen if the database is unavailable for an hour, day or week
- How restore plans can affect the recovery time and number of transactions
Once the restoration requirements are analyzed, backup of database can be created as a part of DRP. But only the database of most recent backup can be restored and the transactions after backup will be lost. This is the reason why Microsoft recommends users to use Backup and Restore feature in SQL Server only for non-mission critical database.
Cons and Pros of Backup and Restore Feature
Advantages:
- Database can be backed up to removable media that protects it from unannounced disk failure
- Network dependency will be reduced when failover clustering or log shipping is used
Disadvantages:
- At the time of backup creation, operations like database shrinking, creating a table or index is restricted
- The most recent data can be important and if failure happens, there is no provision to restore recent data
- The database has to be manually restored at the time of disaster which means more Recovery Time Objective (RTO)