Minimizing Backup and Recovery Times in Mission-Critical Environments

Mission-critical environments often require that the database be available continuously, or for extended periods of time with minimal down-time available for maintenance tasks. Therefore, the duration of unexpected situations, such as a hardware failure, that require the database to be restored need to be kept as short as possible to make the database available again. Additionally, mission-critical databases are often large, requiring longer periods of time to back up and restore. Microsoft® SQL Server™ offers several methods for increasing the speed of backup and restore operations, thereby minimizing the effect on users during both operations:

• Using multiple backup devices simultaneously allows backups to be written to all devices at the same time. Similarly, the backup can be restored from multiple devices at the same time.
• Using a combination of database, differential database, and transaction log backups to minimize the number of backups that need to be applied to bring the database to the point of failure.
• Using file and filegroup backups and transaction log backups, allowing only those files that contain the relevant data to be backed up or restored, rather than backing up the entire database.