Database backup issues

[Pauli X Yang]

Hello all,

I am new to sql 6.5 and am a little confused about database backups. I have been reading that in order to backup and restore a database, you first have to create a dump device and dump the database to the device. My question is if the server sql is on is backup to tape nightly, Why can't you just restore the *.dat file from tape to restore the database? Can anybody explain the database backup process a little. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Pauli

[Paul Ross]

On 12/30/98 2:12:10 PM, Pauli X Yang wrote:
> Hello all,

I am new to sql 6.5 and am a little confused about database
> backups. I have been reading that in order to backup and restore a
> database, you first have to create a dump device and dump the database to
> the device. My question is if the server sql is on is backup to tape
> nightly, Why can't you just restore the *.dat file from tape to restore
> the database? Can anybody explain the database backup process a little.
> Any help is greatly appreciated.

Pauli

Pauli,

If I understand you correctly you want to run a normal tape backup of your disk using NT Backup, BackupExec or something similar. If you want to do that then you will have to stop SQL Server first, otherwise the backup will skip the database with "file busy".

If you do stop SQL Server then you must be careful about restoring - you must restore all devices that are assigned to the database. You also need to be careful that the database allocations in the master database matches the restored database.

You are probably best off using the SQL Server dump. You can define a dump device to go straight to tape (\. ape0 I think - check the documentation) or you can dump to disk and then backup the disk dump to tape (you don't need to crate a device for this use: dump database ??? to disk='c:...&#39.

Paul