I suppose its personal preference.

I prefer using agents because:

 

1. It avoids a two stage recovery if your backup is not on local disk.

2. It puts more control and understanding in the hands of the backup administrator (and more work unfortunately)

3. It avoids scheduling issues - so you don’t start backing up to NetBackup before sql has finished dumping the data (although I suppose you could also get around this using a scripted approach)

4. lighter on client resources - you don’t have to dump the database and then still have to read it into NetBackup

5. In a large DB environment you can save on storage costs by not having to allocate db dump areas

6. If the DB server is not a media server you can still get pretty good performance, perhaps even better than reading off and writing to direct attached disk, while GigE NW and Jumbo frames

 

The downside is the extra training and as someone pointed out the finger pointing between DBA and backup admins - and of course the cost of the agent

 

 

 

Don,

  It entirely depends on your priorities.

   If you can't afford the cost of the agent, well, that's one way to do it. Although you better be figuring in the total ownership cost of 3X the disk space of having your live db and 2 backup copies online. That is not cheap either.

  I've always heard the DBA argument that we always want to have fast access to the disk for restores. I can't rebut the argument that the disk is more highly available than the backup system. However, I can say a SQL server backup to local disk, or restore from local disk, using native SQLserver tools has never been as fast as the NetBackup agent backup - that I have ever seen. Not that it is impossible, but in my years I haven't seen it.

  Also, if you have to go further back for a restore than what you have on disk, it is going to take you several times longer with more potential for errors - restore backup to disk, then restore the db from the disk restore.

  One more thing I'll say for the NetBackup SQL agent (or Oracle too.) Once I have introduced DBA's to the agent, demonstrated how the agent works, how the DBA's can now completely manage their own backups and restores, they have never gone back.

      Bryan


All,
  I am currently looking for info on backing up MS SQL boxes and wondered if the agent actually does any type of snapshotting or are there scripts that have to pause the database and then the backup begins?  We currently have local scripts in place that put the database in a mainteneance mode and copies data to a data directory.  Then the script starts up the database and our Netbackup server comes in and does a regular backup of the box, which includes the data directory.  Why would I spend money for an agent when we get backups with this method?
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