I'm currently working out a backup strategy for our SQL 2008 R2 database. On systems I've worked on in the past where I've had full access to the servers, I've usually set up a Maintenance Plan to take a full daily backup, and then more frequent transaction log backups, allowing us to do a point-in-time restore. Obviously there are more restictions in a shared hosting environment, so I'd be grateful if you could confirm my understanding. When I access the DASP server in Management Studio, I can't see any of the Maintenance Plan options. I assume this is because the login I'm using doesn't have the permissions to do this. Is that correct? The database is currently using the Simple recovery model, so we wouldn't be able to do transaction log backups anyway. Do you support the other recovery models? I understand that I can use the DASP Control Panel to manually take a full backup and copy it to my local machine. I've seen the following tools mentioned on the forums which seem to automate this process. Are these tools that you recommend? http://pfsolutions-mi.com/Product/DASPSQLBackup http://sqlbackupandftp.com/ Could you confirm what your own backup procedures are? I think that you take daily database backups and we can pay to have one restored. How often are these backups kept for, and what time of day are they taken? Many thanks!
That is correct, we don't allow you to set up maintenance plans on our SQL database. We only support Simple Recovery because we limit the size of the SQL log file to 1 GB. We can't allow our customers to use Full Recovery mode because of this limitation and we can't lift this limitation because we're a shared hosting company with limited amount of log file disk space resources. I haven't had time to use sqlbackupandftp.com. But, I know I have tried using http://pfsolutions-mi.com/Product/DASPSQLBackup and its really cool. It was created by one of our customers (frankperez) and it uses our DASP API service. That's the latest SQL backup tool that I know of that really does work and that I liked. More about this tool can be found in our forum post (just in case any one else is wondering about it.) Awesome questions, We do nightly backups of the MS SQL databases every day at around 1 AM - 2 AM PST. You would have to pay to obtain these backups since this is part of our disaster recovery plan. It's not really meant for our customer's backup plan. We highly suggest our customers to make backups of their own SQL databases and not rely on our backup system. We keep these backups going as far back as 5 days only. Anything older will not be available to us.
