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best practice to do BMR backups

manatee
Level 6

NetBackup 7.6.0.3

when doing BMR backups, it is advisable or better to have only the basic Windows services running or does not matter even if SQL Server is up and users are accessing the database?

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mph999
Level 6
Employee Accredited

BMR is only designed to recover the operating system eg C:\  - so if the SQL is up  and running, this won't affect the BMR part of the backup.

The SQL DB would need to be recovered from a 'proper' DB backup.  If you usually shut SQL down and make a 'flat file' backup, then although the BMR backup can be taken anytime, the SQL part would be useless, although the BMR backup would happily restore the OS, the SQL DB would need to be recovered separately.

In terms of best practice, BMR was intended to only recover the OS. 

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4 REPLIES 4

mph999
Level 6
Employee Accredited

BMR is only designed to recover the operating system eg C:\  - so if the SQL is up  and running, this won't affect the BMR part of the backup.

The SQL DB would need to be recovered from a 'proper' DB backup.  If you usually shut SQL down and make a 'flat file' backup, then although the BMR backup can be taken anytime, the SQL part would be useless, although the BMR backup would happily restore the OS, the SQL DB would need to be recovered separately.

In terms of best practice, BMR was intended to only recover the OS. 

manatee
Level 6

if it's designed to cover the OS only, i'm confused as to why when i do a restore of a BMR backup, drive D: is recoverable. isn't it this BMR doing an image backup of all local drives?

please correct me if i'm wrong.

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

BMR does what you tell it to do.

If you backup ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES in the BMR policy, then all drive letters will be available in the BMR restore.
Even if you backup ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES with all services (e.g. MS-SQL) online, then SQL data files (*.mdf, *.ldf. etc) should be excluded.

Michal_Mikulik1
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Hello,

two notes:

- even if BMR can backup/restore drives other than C:, there is no special benefit from it. Then main benefit is that you can restore C: and BMR CD/DVD provides here you "temporary OS engine" which can do it. According to my exprience, it is better to use BMR only for C: restore, because it is a most critical and error-prone step. After you restore C. and verify that it was successful (so the OS is bootable and runnable), you can go on with restore of common data drives like D: etc.

- actually, BMR backup is not "image backup" . It is a common filesystem backup (which can be performed as consistent in time with some snapshot technology like VSS). But the resulting backup is not image in the sense of bit-by-bit partition backup.

Regards

Michal