SQL Backup Pro 6.5

Working with third-party backup tools

I have used SQL Server backup compression software for 8 years now. I transitioned from a competitor to SQL Backup 5 mainly due to the innovative user interface. It was ideal for our network operations environment as it presented the enterprise SQL Server backup status on a single, easy-to-read interface.

Since then SQL Backup has proven to be a highly stable product. On the occasions when support has been necessary, the team at Red Gate has proven to be second-to-none in their ability and responsiveness.

Save time

Since the initial rollout, I have been able to offer new facilities to our development teams, including an automated full Dev/Test/QA data refresh from production (almost 1/2TB of data), achieved in one overnight window and with no loss of development time. This is a task that was previously sequential and took almost a whole week.

Compression

SQL Backup has also underpinned the development and rollout of a major DB upgrade/migration project. Recently, I reviewed a hosted data warehousing server setup and recommended SQL Backup. It achieved almost 90% data compression, and the reduction in per-GB data costs resulted in 100% ROI in just one month

Red Gate tools

Red Gate products are now a permanent part of my software arsenal and the recent success of the pre-release of SQL Backup 6 has only reinforced this.

Why use a backup tool

I have been using SQL Backup Pro since version 4, and the continual improvements in the product have been of great benefit to me. I am the one and only DBA for my company, so tools that perform as advertised and do so in an efficient manner are of great value to me. Red Gate SQL Backup Pro is one such product. I started using the product because I had several SQL Server database servers with only a few but large (100-200GB) databases on them and did not have the space to maintain full backups of all these databases on the local file system of these servers. I needed a backup program that would compress the backups while they were being created, so I would have sufficient space to support the databases and have at least daily backups of those databases. I evaluated the offerings from the three largest vendors of these products (Red Gate, Quest and Idera) and found that SQL Backup Pro was the best value for the money.

Network resilience

The addition of the new network resilience feature in SQL Backup Pro 6 has allowed me to remove the extra step from my daily backup processing that copied the local backups to a remote server. The connection to the backup file server is not always reliable, and the COPYTO functionality in SQL Backup Pro 5 would cause the backup jobs to fail if a connection to that server was interrupted at any point during the backup; thus the need for the extra copy step. During the testing of network resilience, I ran out of space on the destination drive on the remote file server and found that the local backups completed successfully and only the copy operation failed. After cleaning up some space on the file server, the entire operation completed successfully.

Killing existing connections

The other feature that I have found incredibly useful is the option to kill existing connections: the ability for the backup to force close any connections to a database during a restore operation. During server builds, I frequently refresh the databases on the new server with the backups from the existing production server and frequently forget to close ALL the connections to the target databases prior to running the restores. This has saved me numerous hours since I now know that the restores will complete while I am working on other tasks.

Thank you very much Red Gate for such a wonderful and fully-featured tool. Keep up the good work and I look forward to future enhancements to this tool.