I am scheduling the backup of the database using the legacy SQL database backup method. I am not good at databases, but have scheduled it by refereing to the KB documents on the big fix support site.
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he backed up database is approx 24 GB. I presume this is too big of size.
I am currently backing up the BES reporting and the BES enterprise database.
The current machine count is 2000.
Can any one help me in understanding if I am doing anything wrong? Or the database size is usually that big.
I have scheduled a SQL backup of this database on to the local HDD. The folder which contains this backed up database is then backed up onto our corporate Veritas Server.
The total size of the backed up database folder is almost 24 GB.
It seems that the BigFix database sizes in MS SQL are in fact reasonable as Ben suggests. Individual database backups shouldn’t really be much larger than the allocated space. Perhaps the SQL Backup job is configured to ‘Append to Media’ as opposed to ‘Overwrite existing media’ (this would essentially append the backup to the existing media set to allow you to restore your database from various backup points). Can you confirm the MS SQL backup type/configuration for us?
Not sure, but logically thinking I had selected “Append to Media”, How do I check my previous configurations, If I go to the scheduled jobs, I do not see anything which should tell me about my previous set options.
I’m assuming you’re using MS SQL 2000? Depending on how you set up the backup (maintenance plan versus scheduled job), there are different ways to check:
Maintenance Plan: In SQL Enterprise Manager, go to Management -> Database Maintenance Plans. Is there a maintenance plan that is performing your database backup? If so, right-click on the maintenance plan, and go to the ‘Complete Backup’ tab. Here we can get some information as to how the backups are run/stored. Is the ‘Remove files older than’ check mark checked? Is there a value specified? In this case, MS SQL server will have separate backup files for each time the maintenance plan is run, but can be configured to remove the older backup files to ensure the backup history does not grow uncontrollably. Note that this is somewhat different than the ‘Append to Media’ option I’d described in my previous post as it stores the various backups in separate files as opposed to appending the backup points to the same set. Perhaps this explains why your backup folder is so much larger than your database size?
If the backup was not configured through a maintenance plan, let’s check the scheduled jobs.
Scheduled Job: In management -> SQL Server Agent -> jobs, right-click on the job performing the database backup and go to the ‘Steps’ tab. Double-click the first step, and paste the command into the forum please. Then we might be able to determine it’s configuration, and perhaps suggest an alternate method should disk space be a concern.
Your backup job is indeed set to append to the existing backup. Basically, every time your backup runs it eats up another gig of disk space on the backup file.
There is a check box to turn on or off appending versus overwriting in the SQL wizard for setting up backups. If you can’t see how to do it through the maintenance plans you may need to stop the existing backup job and recreate it.
I have a BES database that is 17tb, I only have 40 users and Im having trouble backing the database up. Can anyone give me a hand trying to get this DB down to size?