Choosing a backup software

Before choosing a backup software, you need to consider the following and even more:

• What is your RPO? (recovery point objective)
• What is your RTO? (recovery time objective)
• What type of backup are you requiring, Full, Weekly, Incremental, Off-site?
• What is your backup time window? (Can you fit your backups to it?)
• How many servers do you want to backup - How much data? (Buy a single backup
  server or a server with a media server)
• Will they be supported by the backup software? (OS and application)
• What is the average daily data change? (Full every day or incremental)
• What is your growth prediction?
• Do you have more than one site to backup?
• Are you buying a new backup server or using an old one? (Check hardware
  and OS compatibility lists)
• Are you migrating from an old backup program to a new one? (Keep the old
  one alive? for how long?)
• Backup to tape or disk? (simple disk or a Deduplication disk?)
• Is the data on NAS devices or servers? (What vendor? - check support matrix, needs
  NDMP license)
• How many virtual machines are you planning to backup? (Network backup or SAN backup)
• Are your virtual machines VSS aware?
• Will your backup program be able to truncate the virtual machine log? (SQL, SharePoint, Exchange)
• Does your virtual machines contain physical RDM (VMware) or pass through
  disks (Hyper-V)? (You will need an agent)
• Do you have a virtual cluster? (Virtual center - VMware, CSV - Hyper-V)
• Some virtual machines are actually an appliance - Their vendor should supply a
  way to back them up.
• Have you got a DR site? (Backup the DR servers, allow quick recovery on the DR site,
  additional hardware)
• What kind of support are you looking for? (24x7, 9-17 etc.)
• What is your budget?

Don't forget the most important rule of backups: Restore!

The following links will provide you with a starting point and will show you the trends of the
enterprise backup software community:

List of backup software (Wikipedia)

Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances (June 2015)

Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances (September 2015)

Truncating the Transaction Log‏

The backup operation or the Truncate method does not reduce the log file size.
Depending on how Microsoft SQL Server is configured (Recovery Model set to Full or Bulk logged), the transaction log files will grow in size as needed so as to keep the database running. Once SQL server allocates disk space on the hard disk drive to a database transaction log file, that space will not be "freed up" when a transaction log backup is run. What is truncated by SQL server in the course of a backup is the amount of space that is in use in the transaction log. While the size of the transaction log file on the hard disk is not changed, the amount of space in use in the transaction log has been reduced.

To reduce the size of the transaction log file, you must shrink the transaction log file. To shrink a transaction log file to the requested size and to remove the unused pages, you must use the DBCC SHRINKFILE operation. The DBCC SHRINKFILE Transact-SQL statement can only shrink the inactive part of the log file.

To prevent the transaction log files from growing unexpectedly, consider using one of the
following methods:

1. Set the size of the transaction log files to a large value to avoid the automatic expansion of the transaction log files.
2. Configure the automatic expansion of transaction log files by using memory units instead of a percentage after you thoroughly evaluate the optimum memory size.

To determine the amount of disk space in use by the log file, use the following query in the SQL
Query Analyzer:

use master
DBCC SQLPERF (LOGSPACE)

Funny Backup Videos Collection

Amnesia Commercial
Who needs a backup software when you can rely on your mind?

Institute for Backup Trauma
The classic viral web video starring John Cleese - that made fun of tape backup to promote online backup. Done with Jeff Weiner, the team at Thundersky (now Captains of Industry), and many others.

Mom Ate My Homework
Whatever can happen to a mom tucking in her kid?

Fish Tank Accident
For the two seconds you leave your laptop unattended, you never know what unforeseen incident could happen.

Cafe Accident
Hot pot of coffee and a nervous waitress in training doesn't make for a happy customer ...

Funny Holiday Mishap
Sometimes the most unlikely of hazards can happen to our devices ...

Active Directory backup on a virtual machine

Backing up domain controllers is a critical requirement for any environment.

It does not realty matter which virtualizing technology you are using, 

Microsoft does support backing up your domain controllers with snapshots.

Restoring an active directory from a snapshot will cause replication to proceed with inappropriate tracking numbers (USN), resulting in an inconsistent database among 

domain controller replicas. In most cases, this problem goes undetected by the replication system and no errors are reported, despite inconsistencies between domain controllers.

The supported method that you can use to roll back the contents of active directory is to use an active directory aware backup and restoration utility that uses Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy service APIs.
Microsoft also suggests that in a production environment, you should make system state backups from two different DCs on a daily basis.

Here are some general best practice guidelines from VMware:

• Avoid snapshots or REDOs for domain controller virtual machines.
• Never attempt to recover an Active Directory database from a backup copy of an old virtual disk.

Funny Backup Cartoons