Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

18.4. Planning for Recovery

To mitigate the risk and extent of data loss, one of the DBA's most important tasks is database backup and planning for recovery. You need to develop a backup plan that minimizes data loss and is able to be implemented within the maintenance window of time allowed. Choose the best SQL Server backup capabilities to achieve the preferred backup plan, one that meets the continuity and data loss requirements for the business. You must also set up the backup procedure and monitor it every day to ensure that it is working successfully. That includes validating that the database backup will restore properly.

An organization may be current with its backups and assume that it has the necessary backups to restore the database, only to find that the database was corrupted and some of the recent database backups will not restore. Cases like these can go undiscovered for months until someone needs to restore a database and finds out that it is not recoverable. To reduce this risk, run the database-consistency checks against each database and design a process to test the recoverability of the database backup. Additionally, send database backups offsite to protect them in case of a local disaster, but keep local copies of recent backups in case you need to perform a quick restore.

Another critical task is disaster recovery planning. If the organization data center were to be completely destroyed, you should be able to quickly deploy a new data center with minimum ...