Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

Chapter 18. Backup and Recovery

Data is a critical asset for an organization to maintain information about its customers, inventory, purchases, financials, and products. Over the course of many years, organizations amass information to improve the daily customer experience, as well as to leverage this information to support strategic decisions. Downtime is unacceptable and can be costly for the organization; for example, without their databases, a stock brokerage house cannot take stock orders and an airline cannot sell tickets. Every hour the database is down can add up to millions of dollars of business opportunities lost. To keep their business activities going, organizations deploy high-availability solutions, such as failover clustering, data mirroring, and log shipping, so that when a database server fails, they can continue to run their business on a standby database server. All of these topics are covered in other chapters in this book.

In addition, a storage area network (SAN) system is protected by fault-tolerant disk arrays; and to protect it from a local disaster, businesses normally have a disaster recovery plan to handle scenarios, such as when the site where the organization does its business is down and it needs to quickly redeploy the data center to continue to serve customers.

While a high-availability solution tries to keep the business data online, a database backup plan is crucial to protect the business data asset. If there is a data-error problem and the ...