Background Whilst watching a Pluralsight training course by Paul Randal, on ‘Logging, Recovery and the Transaction log’, a particular snippet related to differential backups piqued my curiosity. Basically, does a differential backup only take backups of altered pages, within a database. The short answer is ‘yes’, but the detail is a little bit more interesting …
Background So, you have a multi-terabyte database and a SQL Server full backup. Just imagine that you do something that wrecks the data in one table (and of course, that has never happened), the only secure copy is within a backup file that will take several hours to restore and you don’t have the time …
Background Untested backups. An awful lot is said about taking regular backups, although an inordinate number of people out there appear to ignore it. What is less talked about is actually checking that the backups are usable – it’s no good having a series of backups for that fateful day to discover that when they’re …
Notes on SQL 