Quest backup products for SQL Server

[DrSql]

Is anyone have any thoughts or experince with "Quest backup products for SQL Server". Our compnay is currently evaluating third party tools for backups and moniotring. Any suggestions or comments are greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Dr.Sql
Good Luck.

 

[mrdenny]

I always recommend that people stick with the native backup tools within SQL Server. Personally I don't see enough value added to justify the cost of the tools. Not to mention if you use the tool to backup your database, you now need another license for the tool on the development server to restore the database.

However Quest does have some great monitoring tools.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Configuration / Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Configuration)
MCITP Database Administrator (SQL 2005) / Database Developer (SQL 2005)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

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[ptheriault]

If you do want to go 3rd party product I think litespeed by quest is the best. I have been using it for sometime now. IF you get the enterprise edition you can do single table recovery. I get 88% compression and backup time cut by 40%. They also give 50% off the price for Dev boxes. But as Denny pointed out, the only way you can restore a litespeed backup to another server is if that server also has listspeed installed.

As for monitoring tools I use SQLdm from Idera. It is outstanding. You should also check out SQL Change Manager by Idera.

- Paul

- If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.

 

[aalmeida]

really isn't worth to acquire 3rd party backup software for SQL server, but there are circusntances that you might find you self unable to use SQL server native backup for example not enough space for backup systems, for these times I would say try Red-Gate's SQL Backup tool the price is reasonable and it has compression.

AL Almeida
Senior DBA

http://www.saxotech.com/

"May all those that come behind us, find us faithfull"

 

[DrSql]

We are looking into third party tools becasue we have some db's 300-600 GBs and few in TB size. If we can recover the cost of disk for this third party tools its well worth it plus. Any thoughts on RedGate vs LiteSpeed?
Thanks

Dr.Sql
Good Luck.

 

[onpnt]

I agree with Denny on using SQL over others. We were using netbackup and I threw it out basically. We have DB's the same size and larger also. I'm not sure how you're going to get by with less disc using third party tools unless you use some other method of compression which would pretty much freak me out on my backups. If you are worried about disc I would go to tape then with db's that size.



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[DrSql]

Thanks for all the advices. I have the same feeling about using third party tools. The only reason I am considering is becasue of the compression level. When we take a backup of 500 to 800 GB its so hard to move in and aorund to dev and staging environment. We have around 65 to 75 servers and around 20 of the servers have db's that are bigger than 200 GB, our current process is we do the sql native backups to hard disk and veritas will backup the file to tape. We have around 600 to 700 servers in our DC and we have grouped into several veritas backups to to do the system and file backups, this can take more than 12 hours to do the incremental backups. By compressing the sql backups will be a huge bonus for tapes and disks for bigger dbs. Let us evalaute and post my thought later.


Dr.Sql
Good Luck.