Hi Everyone,

I'm working on a site that is running MS SQL 2000. They perform
regular backups of databases and log files and in the event of a
disaster they have a second backup server.

At present they regularly copy the backup up files from the production
server to the standby server. The plan, in the event of a disaster, is
to restore these backups onto the standby server and change the dns
records so that client machines will point to the standby server.

Is there a better way?

Thanks for any advice,
Danny

<Daniel.Peaper (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

The best availabity and backup solution is the one you can afford and how
much downtime you can afford.

Yes, a trite answer, but a true one.

Log-shipping is a fairly good way to do things (and saved my former company
from a complete disaster during our recent meltdown).

That will protect you against a lot of failures on the main machine. And
has the advantage of pretty much testing your backups every day (assuming
you're applying the logs on a regular basis).

But, there's a delay while you failover. Is that acceptable? If you're a
ma and pa shop running 9-5 where downtime might cost you $100/hour. That's
probably ok.

If you're a 24/7 operation where downtime costs you $1000/minute, that might
not be.

In which case some sort of clustering solution along with log-shipping may
work.

Or if you need to, you have a SAN with triple mirrored disks, where every X
hours, you split off a mirror make a backup from that, remirror, etc.

Also note that SQL 2005 has several additional options including database
mirroring that you can play with that gives you an even faster failover
method.

Simply put, there is no simple answer and a lot depends on your needs and
your budget.





--
Greg Moore
SQL Server DBA Consulting
sql (at) greenms.com http://www.greenms.com

Thanks Greg,

Budget is tight. I understand that they only have one SQL license and
so the standby server's copy of SQL is not normally running.

Cheers,
Danny