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Backup Exec 2010 R3

chrissaga
Level 2

Good Morning

 

I am currently contracting at a company and there seems to be a weird backup setup by the previous onsite IT person. They currently use Backup Exec 2010 R3 for the daily backups. The application used is an Access Database which is used as their ERP software.  As part of their daily backups, at 5 PM daily, all users are logged off from the database and it is then backed up to a local drive.  The scheduled nightly backup then backs up our sepecifed folders including this backup of the database.

I am not sure if this 'pre-backup' of the Access database is actually required. Can anyone advise if it is even necessary ?

I have attempted calling Veritas directly but as this product is no longer supported, they refused to answer any of my questions.  PS I do intend to upgrade to version 2016 but not too sure how soon this will be. In the mean time can someone please advise whether it is sufficient to just do the scheduled daily backups and not a separate backup of the database as well. Will the backup exec client back up the database even through there are users connected to it?

thanks

Chris

 

 

2 REPLIES 2

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Backup Exec does not directly support Access (and never has)

For any database that your backup product  does not support (assuming it is running on a supported operating system) you cannot just backup the files of the database itself as when it comes to a restore, you will almost guarantee to have inconsistencies because of the way databases write to multiple files and continue writing data as the backup is running. The worst case scenario for inconsistencies found during a restore is a corrupt/unusable database. Hence for an unsupported database you can usually use a utility provided by the database vendor to backup or dump the data in a consistent way to files and then you backup those files with your backup product. If no vendor supplied utility exists then you have to logout all users, safely shutdown the database services and then backup the files and folders that make up the database.

For any given database the advice on how to backup the database when no direct backup product support is available would come from the database application vendor (or possibly the database designer/developer) and NOT the backup product vendor as if something goes wrong with the process, the backup product is only responsible for the files you backed up and not the database itself.

All this probably means your colleague tried to do the correct thing with his backups - the concern would be whether he had the correct advice about what to backup and how to do it (and we cannot help with that)

Note: This information is independent of Backup Exec as it would apply to all backup products that do not directly support a specific database technology.

 

Thanks for the Advice Colin. I appreciate your input.

 

regards

 

Chris