[Anne Marie]

Hi all

I would like to hear how often y'all restore your RE database from a backup?

Not a forced restore because you need to retrieve yesterday's info etc, but as a matter of course for testing purposes.

Do you restore/test the restore procedure routinely?

Maybe you NEVER restore???

I'd appreciate all comments, reasons, excuses and so on. Trying to establish the "norm".

Thanks fellow passengers!

Cheers,

[Peter Gulka]

I don't know that I have ever done that...

[Melissa Siobhan]

The norm and what is recommended will inevitably be very different. Not all of us are probably doing what is recommended but just because one of us jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge...

There was a very recent user of RE who psoted to one of the forums (what it this one or BBs?) that she lost her database and the only recoverable backup she could use was from 2004. If you do not want to be the next you should test your backups regularly.

What regularly means to you could be different depending on the size of your database and how long it would take you to manually re-enter a week's, month's, quarter's, year's worth of data. A large university entering thousands of gifts a day would likely test more often than someone entering 1,000 gifts a year but I would never recommend anyone test less often than quarterly.

[Jo Ward]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anne Marie

Hi all

I would like to hear how often y'all restore your RE database from a backup?

Not a forced restore because you need to retrieve yesterday's info etc, but as a matter of course for testing purposes.

Do you restore/test the restore procedure routinely?

Maybe you NEVER restore???

I'd appreciate all comments, reasons, excuses and so on. Trying to establish the "norm".

Thanks fellow passengers!

Cheers,

We outsource our IT functions, including backup. In our contract, we call for testing the restore process on a weekly basis. This is a good thing for us, and on one occasion we were unable to restore from what looked like a successful backup. We keep nightly backups for a week before overwriting them and use weekly and monthly backups as well.

As Melissa said, how often you do this depends on the size and activity on your database, and how much you are willing to re-enter should an acceptable backup not exist.

Jo

[Kezza]

We use BB Management Console to schedule backups every night of RE database. We also have legato software running that backups the entire server nightly. Legato also keeps 7 days of backups, 2 week old backup and month old backup from memory. Not sure if BBMC can be configured to this (been while since looked at settings).

We also run a standalone test server which we test majority of imports (excluding event imports). So we are loading the database into test every 2-3 weeks normally.

Never had a problem with backups not working but would hightly recommend doing tests if nothing else then for peace of mind.

As mentioned frequency all depends on how much your database is used. I see no reason not to be running backups at least daily and maybe test monthly. In saying that if we were doing large amounts of transactions a day I might be more inclined to backup more than once a day.

[Anne Marie]

I think we have the backup covered. It's the restorring from backup that has me concerned somewhat.

[Harriet]

I restore RE once a month and test critical processes. I rotate to a different day's backup drive each month.

I don't think I could sleep at night if I had never restored tested the daily backups.