SQL Server Offsite Backups
- by Eric Maibach
We have about !TB of SQL Server databases, and these databases generate about 200GB of data changes each day. Up to this point we have been doing Weekly full backups, daily diff backups, and hourly transaction log backups. The full and diff backups are backed up to tape and taken offsite each day.
We have been trying to move away from tapes, and our IT department purchased a Barracuda Backup device that backups up data and then sends it offsite using our internet connection. I have been trying to get this to work for our SQL Server backups, and have ran into a number of problems. I normally like to just use SQL Server to perform backups instead of trying to use a agent, so that is what I tried first. However the Barracuda device was not able to dedup these files very well, so it ended up being to much data to try to send offsite and to archive. I then tried installing the Barracuda agent and using it to backup the SQL Server databases. However the problem I am having there is that on some of the database servers I also have files that need backed up, and I cannot find a way to create seperate backup schedules for the file backups and the SQL Server backups. Barracuda only does full or transaction log backups. So if I want to do hourly transaction log backups I end up doing a file system backup every hour (which is not good), or if I only schedule the backups to run once a night I either have to do a full backup every night, or only do a transaction backup once a day. None of these scenarios are good options.
My question is, how is everyone else getting their large SQL Server database backups offsite. Are you just using tape, or have you found a offsite backup device that works well? Is anybody else using Barracuda to backup their SQL Server databases? If you do, then how do you have it setup?
