Whats more important than a backup plan?

A restore plan of course is far more important than the backup plan.

When things go wrong and you need to restore a database backup, that is not the time to be learning how to do a restore, or to find out if you were backing up the right data.

My suggestion if your backups are important (why wouldn’t the be), then you should practice doing a restore on a regular basis.  How often is often enough?  Well that depends on your data, and your familiarity with the restore process.

I like to do a restore on at least a weekly basis, but depending on the data I may do a restore on a daily basis.  Also, when doing a restore, don’t just do a full restore, do a full plus logs, this way you will be practicing the same process that you will need to be using when a real failure occurs.

I have talked with many DBA’s who know how to do a restore of a full backup, but who have never restored a full then applied the transaction logs.

The restore of the backups plus transaction logs is simple if you practice it and have it scripted.  It is extremely complex and hard to follow if it is your first time doing it.

My suggestion, if you have never done a restore with transaction logs, then do it now, and practice it weekly until you are good at it, then practice it monthly at least.

Remember databases never fail at convenient times, and when there is a database failure all of management will be waiting on you to fix it.  Be Prepared.

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