> > Not sure where you're coming from here so my answer may not match the > > intent of your question. > > I guess my point was simply that backing up transaction logs is an > important part of MSSQL, and generally involves dumping them to ASCII (?) > files as well, then doing a second step to get them off to archival > media.
I would always use MSSQL backups (eg 'BACKUP LOG xyzzy TO backupdevice'), which stores things in a binary file. I'm not sure that there is a way to get an ASCII (I assume you mean plain text) representation of the transaction logs, or why you would want to. > And I guess my point to that was if you want to make a plugin to backup > MSSQL, it's got to get the transaction logs as well. I've been toying with this, and I'm almost to the point where the director can query my agent and ask for an estimate of data to be backed up. The way this works is that when you issue the SQL command "BACKUP LOG xyzzy TO PIPE = '\\.\pipe\bacula6789'", MSSQL creates the named pipe and waits for the agent to connect to it. Once connected, MSSQL just pumps the data down until finished. This works for "BACKUP DATABASE" and "BACKUP LOG" commands in just the same way, so there is little need to differentiate. > > I always do full backups where possible, but in the case of an > > incremental backup, you would do the full database backup at the start > > of the backup cycle (eg Monday), and then only the transaction logs for > > the remainder of the backup cycle. My mistrust of tapes (bordering on > > superstitious :) leads me to believe that a full nightly backup is the > > only way to go, otherwise you are pinning the ability to do a useful > > restore on more than one tape. > > Agreed. I have a few clients where the amount of data they have to back > up is small enough that (IMHO) it's practical to do a full backup every > time. In such a case, I figure it's smarter than dealing with > incrementals, where things can sometimes go wrong. The MSSQL databases of our clients wouldn't be larger than 10-20gb, Exchange databases would be under 30gb, and total ordinary files would be no larger than 200-300gb (often much less), so a 200/400gb LTO drive is plenty big enough for most and still cheap enough to be used in preference to incremental backups. Our recommendation (and most clients follow it) is to have a set of 4 tapes for Monday to Thursday backups, 5 tapes for Friday backups, and to take a tape out of the set and archive it at significant dates (per quarter, each financial year, etc depending on the client and their records keeping needs). This is using Seagate Backup Exec though, Do you have a rule of thumb for the point at which you would say "this is too much data, lets do it incrementally"? Thanks James ------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid0709&bid&3057&dat1642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
