Hello, Grant Fritchey here, one of these Scary DBAs. Tony isn’t around at the moment so I stopped by to talk for minute. Yeah, I could go on about some of those cool and controversial topics that Tony always brings up, but I’m a DBA. By definition that makes me dull and irritable. I’ve noticed that a lot of you, a lot of you, have not been doing a good job at brushing your teeth and cleaning your room. By that I mean you’re not running a good set of backups and testing them to be sure they work well. Yeah, I know, I’ve got two teenagers and when either phrase comes out of my mouth, “Hey, did you brush your teeth,” or “Clean your room before you go with your friends” inevitably the groans and moans start. Same thing with so many IT Pros these days, “Have you set up log backups” and “Did you test your backups and backup process” elicit all kinds of groaning about “We don’t have time” and “We tested it 18 months ago and nothing has changed” and “But I’ll clean my room later”. wait, that was my kids again.

Look, it’s not my job to help you keep yours. oh, it actually sort of is. You enjoy bringing home that paycheck, right? Then you need to set up a good backup plan and most importantly, you need to test it. Testing it doesn’t just mean you run RESTOREVERIFYONLY or something. It means you run a full restore, and not just through automated scripts. You need to know that your backup is good and you need to know that you can retrieve that backup. The number of times I see posts on forums talking about some failure or other that people have experienced, but, no, they don’t have a backup, why do you ask, is enough to make you crazy. It’s even worse when you hear the stories about people who set up the backup process but haven’t checked it since and it’s been failing for six months and they didn’t know so what do they do now, or they have the backup but have never done a point in time recovery how does that work and can you hurry with the explanation because production is down and the boss and her boss and his boss are all standing in my cubicle.

My statement to you: set up your backup processes and test those processes. I have two questions for you and I’d love to get some good answers to these. Why don’t people set up good backups and what do we, the IT community, have to do to get the word out to everyone, because we’re not getting that job done.