Backup & Restore of 4TB database

[tshubick]

We recently took a full backup of a 4TB SQL Server database that we have and as a test, are restoring it to a different server.  Our problem is that the restore is taking a very long time.  Does anyone have any experience backing up such a large SQL database and restoring it?  What options should we look at for optimizing both the backup and restore process?

[Omar_Villa]

OK to do a good math we need the following:

1. Drive Model

2. Network Speed

3. CPU/Memory on SQL client

4. Buffers on media server and client

5. Timeout configuration, has CLIENT_CONNECT_TIMEOUT, MEDIA_CONNECT_TIMEOUT

All this can help to tuneup a backup and restore, in my opinion the first thing you need to do for DB of this size is install netbackup media server module over the SQL box and configure 2-4 drives depending of the speeds of this ones, this way the data will flow just trough the FC/SCSI wire, saving the Network bottleneck, is just a start, other good thing can be to add a LUN over the SQL box of 10TB and run your backups there with an expiration date of 2 days, then send this images duplicated to tape, this can improve your restores because the data will came from disk and try to use good speed diks not 7200rpm ones, at least 10,000rpm FC

hope this helps.

regards