Found this on SQLServerCentral.com... it discusses how to use separate
maintenance (backup) plans for each database to minimize dasd utilization.
I've adopted it here for our Production Servers and it hasn't failed me
yet!
The Maintenance Plan Wizard can create useful maintenance plans for your
SQL Servers. These plans work very well until you don't have enough hard
drive space for all the backups to complete. At this point the backup
job will fail and the old backups will not get deleted.
An example of this problem is as follows:
Lets say one backup for each database takes 5 GB of space. Each
individual database backup is 1 GB or less. If you keep 2 days of
backups you would need 10 GB of space just to store the backups. If
after that, you have less than 5GB of free space the next time your
maintenance plan runs the backup job will fail. This is because it will
create all the new backups before deleting any of the old backup files.
To minimize this problem you can create a maintenance plan for each
database. This means that upon successful completion of a backup for
each database the old one is deleted. Then you can set each plan to make
its backups 5 minutes after the previous plan until all are done.
Thus if we use the same example as I described earlier all your
maintenance plans would succeed as long as you have at least 1GB of free
space.
Yes, this will require more time to set up initially, but if you can't
get more hard drive space then this could be the solution for you.
Pranabesh Sarkar
<[Email Address Removed] To: "LazyDBA.com Discussion" <[Email Address Removed]
com> cc:
Subject: Backup and Restore Strategies on Production machine
02/25/2003 12:28
PM
Hi Everyone,
We are reviewing our backup and restore strategy on the production server.
Can anyone share their backup strategies for the production machine with
me.
Will help me to come up with a better plan for our servers.
Thanks are Regards,
Pranav
---------------------------------------------------------------------
TO REPLY TO EVERBODY , PLEASE CLICK REPLY-ALL, NOT JUST REPLY
To unsubscribe, e-mail: mssqldba-[Email Address Removed] additional commands, e-mail: mssqldba-[Email Address Removed]MS Sql Server LazyDBA home page