Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Bible

Disaster Recovery

Disasters happen. Servers crash or retire. To quickly and gracefully recover from an unexpected loss of a Reporting Services Server, a couple of objects must be accessible for restoring:

• The Reporting Catalog (ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB)
• The reporting services encryption key

It is also a good idea to back up all the configuration files for reporting services upon initial installation and thereafter when a change is made to them. For more information on working with SSRS configuration files, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155866(v=SQL.110).aspx.

Backing Up the Catalog

The Reporting Services catalog consists of two SQL Server databases: ReportServer and ReportServertempdb. ReportServer is critical to backup because it contains your reports, metadata, and source — all your designed, permanent objects are stored here. ReportServertempdb contains report snapshots and user session information and can be re-created by re-creating the ReportServer database, but it is much better to restore the table structure from a backup. Because these members of the catalog are SQL Server databases, they can be backed up natively or using any third-party tool that supports SQL Server. SQL Server 2012 integrated mode introduces a third database to the catalog, the ReportServerAlerts database, which as the name implies, contains the metadata for data alerts.

For more information on backing up and restoring SQL Server, see Chapter 21, “Backup and Recovery Planning.” ...