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This is rather basic question.

We do backups of all the databases on the server and size around 20GB every week. All that is scheduled (shrinking,Backing up)

We store them on Network drive.

Now that the .bak files have grown in number (lets say 10 databases backups ,each 10GB that makes 100Gb a week and 400Gb Per Month and 2400Gb every 6 months).

Although, hard disk space is cheap to buy nowadays, the problem is archiving them for future references.

What's the best solution to store backups (let's say, we need data going back as far as 6 months to 1 year)?

Note: I am using SQL Server 2000.

Thanks,

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Shrinking as in regularly maintenance shrinks the DBs? Remove that immediately, as in right now, before you continue reading. Why you should not shrink your data files.

As for your question, there are far too many unknowns. Do you need disaster recovery, including geo-DR? Do you need a warm standby location? What is your desired recovery interval in case of disaster (what is the max time allowed to rebuild the dbs from scratch)? Do you have a restore procedure, and did you exercise it?

Basically you need to consider having at least two backup locations, preferable geographically separated, you need to periodically restore your backups to validate them, you need a full/differential/log backup schedule that matches your data retention mandate and recovery interval requirement, you need to look into backup compression (native in SQL Server 2008/R2, in 2000 you have SQL LiteSpeed).

Read a book on the subject, like Pro SQL Server Disaster Recovery.

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  • Thanks for the info,as you can see i m still in the learning process.Here' additional info: All i am doing now is backup the Dbs to a Geographically seperated Network drive,Regarding the recovery strategy ,I have tested restoring individual database to a different server using a sample/simple script and it worked fine.My question is more of storage related rather than recovery strategy.
    – ThinkingCap
    Jun 9, 2011 at 14:00

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