Tips

Check for Updates

Periodically, DMT Software issues updates for SQL Backup Manager. For example:

• free maintenance upgrades
• major upgrades that you can purchase
• notifications to inform you about new products or offers from DMT Software
  

To check for any updates that are available for download:

• On the Help menu, click Check for Updates.

• Ensure that you are connected to the Internet, and then on the Online Update dialog box, click Check for Updates.
  • The updates that are available are listed.
• Click Install to update.

Using Network Shares with SQL Backup Manager

SQL Backup Manger can create backups directly on a network share address. However, the startup user for the SQL Backup Manager Service must have Full permissions on the network share address.

The following procedure describes how you grant the permissions using Microsoft® Windows® XP; refer to your Microsoft Windows documentation for full details for your operating system.

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click on the folder in which you want to create the backups, and then click Sharing and Security.
2. Select Share this folder, and set the properties of the share as required.
3. Click Permissions, and on the Share Permissions dialog box, click Add.
4. On the Select Users, Computers, or Groups dialog box, grant full access to the account used by the SQL Backup Agent service.
5. Click OK on all of the dialog boxes.

File Location Tags

SQL Backup Manager enables you to set up file name that are automatically generated when the backup is created, by using tags. For example, you can use tags to include the date and time of creation of a backup in its file name:
<server>_<type>_<database>_<datetime>.qbf

Tags are particularly useful when you are backing up multiple databases in one operation. For example, you could specify that the backup files for each database are to be created in a separate folder using the <DATABASE> tag in the path:
<DATABASE>\Backup.qbf

You can use the following tags in path and file names:

Restoring the Master Database

To restore the master database, you must use the SQL Backup command line to ensure that the SQL Server is started in single user mode.

1. Stop the SQL Server service.
2. Open a command prompt window, and navigate to the SQL Server instance's Binn folder.
3. Start SQL Server in single user mode using sqlservr.exe -c -m for an unnamed instance, or sqlservr.exe -c -m -s {instancename} for a named instance.
   Use the SQL Backup command line interface to restore the master database.
   For example, at the command prompt, type:

SQLBackupC -SQL "RESTORE DATABASE master FROM DISK = 'C:\Backups\master 20070101.sqb'"

For a named instance, use the -I parameter to specify the instance name, for example:

SQLBackupC -SQL "RESTORE DATABASE master FROM DISK = 'G:\Backups\master 20070101.sqb'" -I Instance2

SQL Backup restores the master database, and SQL Server automatically stops the SQL Server service when the restore operation is complete.

• You can now start the SQL Server in normal mode.

Performance Expectations

This topic compares the native SQL Server backup and restore performance against similar operations performed by SQL Backup Manager.

The numbers shown here should be used only as a broad indicator of expected performance. The performance you can achieve using SQL Backup depends upon your own setup, such as hard disk configuration and throughput.

Results for a 10 GB database
This test was run on a single processor server with 2 GB of RAM.