Why is Microsoft SQL Server backup important?

Today, enterprises depend on Microsoft SQL Server for a broad range of essential business functions, which makes choosing the right backup solution critical. The goal is to protect databases from data loss and long-term outages, and avoid the often significant financial and productivity costs that can result. A cost-effective and reliable backup and recovery solution for Microsoft SQL Server is even more important because of the many data challenges enterprises face, such as: Data growth: Growing volumes of data increase the complexity and cost of backing up and recovering Microsoft SQL Servers. Regulatory changes: Ever-changing compliance mandates like HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI make Microsoft SQL backups considerably more complex. Increasing costs: The more data organizations have, the more the business has to pay for bandwidth, storage, and data management. Slow backups and restores: As data grows, backups and restores take longer to complete, and performance can degrade significantly. More complex environments: Enterprise businesses store and access data across many locations, including on-prem, edge, and cloud, which can complicate the management, security, and protection of data across these environments.

How do I back up Microsoft SQL Server?

You back up Microsoft SQL Server by making copies of your databases and saving them to backup files. Or you can move the backups to another location or to the cloud for long-term retention and cost optimization. These backups become essential if something happens to your databases, or if you need to access the data for secondary purposes without impacting production. There are three different types of Microsoft SQL Server backups: Full backup: This is a complete copy of everything in the database, and it serves as a foundation for other backup types. Differential backup: This type of backup contains all the changes that were made to the database since the most recent full backup. This has the advantage of a quicker recovery time, requiring only a full backup and the last differential backup to restore the entire Microsoft SQL database. Transaction logs backup: This type of backup copies the transaction logs, which contain the whole history of modifications to the Microsoft SQL database. If you need to recover a database to a certain point in time, you can use this type of backup.

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Simplified backup and instant recovery for Microsoft SQL Server

Protect Microsoft SQL Server at scale with seamless integrations and powerful security features to defend against ransomware and cyber threats, available as a service or self-managed software.

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Use cases
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Overview

Simplified protection. Instant recovery.

Simplify Microsoft SQL Server backups with integrated protection and granular recovery of databases, tables, and transactions.

Simple

Automatically discover and manage databases from a convenient dashboard. Easily search across database backups for fast and granular recovery.

Scalable

Instantly recover databases to any point in time and location to exceed recovery SLAs. Quickly clone database copies for development, testing, and analytics without impacting production. Rapidly migrate databases without the need for log shipping.

Secure

Safeguard your data from ransomware and cyber threats with unlimited immutable protection and flexibility. Isolate, archive, and replicate to the cloud for reliable recovery. Reduce your attack surface up to 96x or more with global deduplication and compression.

Use cases

Ransomware recovery

Bounce back from cyberattacks and other disasters effortlessly. Eliminate downtime and refuse the ransom with fast database-level recovery to any point in time and location from a unified UI.

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Development and testing

Make SQL backups instantly available on-demand to empower development, simplify testing, and accelerate innovation—without the need for extra capacity or costs.

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Backup as a service

Leverage cloud-native protection for Microsoft SQL Server with unified management across on-premises, edge, and cloud instances. Optimize costs with predictable pricing and unified backup for all your critical database workloads.

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DataProtect

Simplify and accelerate backup and recovery of enterprise workloads across on-premises and cloud with a secured unified platform for data resilience.

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DataProtect delivered as a service

Protect your critical SaaS, cloud-native, and on-prem data sources with an enterprise-class cloud backup service.

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Databases

Streamline backups while safeguarding all your critical databases from cyberattacks with a unified data security and management platform.

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Video

Choosing a data protection solution for databases

Christophe Bertrand of ESG explains why organizations need to place application data recoverability at the heart of their data protection strategy.

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Testimonials

Cohesity saves a lot of time for our engineers because it automates tasks we used to do manually, like replication and archiving. If any virtual machine or SQL Server is encrypted in an attack, we can instantly restore a snapshot to any point in time.”

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Bobby LaFleur

Director of Application Support, Spring Independent School District

We had several backups that took several hours to complete. Now, they take under an hour. We can recover a virtual machine in just minutes and individual files in just seconds. Cohesity gave us the ability to speed up our backups, speed up recoveries, and gave us a test environment."

Byron Williams

IT Infrastructure Manager, Piedmont HealthCare

We experienced a failure of one of our SANs, leading to the loss of an important database server. Within a very short space of time, we stood up a virtual machine clone of the failed (physical) server with the database attached, all running on the Cohesity platform, with no requirement for running a restore! We were subsequently able to conduct a full planned migration of that database to a new SAN cluster in a safe and controlled manner. Without Cohesity the restoration of that database to a working state would have taken a significantly longer period, which proved our decision to use Cohesity in one incident."

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Alex Threlfall

Infrastructure and Hardware Consultant, Anana

Analyst reports

Cohesity named a Leader again!

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Cohesity Named a Leader for Protecting and Recovering Data in the Cloud Era

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Commonly asked Microsoft SQL Server backup and recovery questions

Microsoft SQL Server backup is the process of protecting and securing copies of all data stored in Microsoft SQL Server databases, so you can recover from outages or leverage the backups for development, testing, or analytics.

A Microsoft SQL Server backup solution will protect databases and their corresponding log files, and enable database-level recovery anywhere, anytime. A good Microsoft SQL Server backup solution should help meet your organization’s data retention, data privacy, and business requirements cost-effectively while making it quick and easy to access backups for recovery and secondary purposes.

Today, enterprises depend on Microsoft SQL Server for a broad range of essential business functions, which makes choosing the right backup solution critical. The goal is to protect databases from data loss and long-term outages, and avoid the often significant financial and productivity costs that can result.

A cost-effective and reliable backup and recovery solution for Microsoft SQL Server is even more important because of the many data challenges enterprises face, such as:

Data growth: Growing volumes of data increase the complexity and cost of backing up and recovering Microsoft SQL Servers.
Regulatory changes: Ever-changing compliance mandates like HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI make Microsoft SQL backups considerably more complex.
Increasing costs: The more data organizations have, the more the business has to pay for bandwidth, storage, and data management.
Slow backups and restores: As data grows, backups and restores take longer to complete, and performance can degrade significantly.
More complex environments: Enterprise businesses store and access data across many locations, including on-prem, edge, and cloud, which can complicate the management, security, and protection of data across these environments.

You back up Microsoft SQL Server by making copies of your databases and saving them to backup files. Or you can move the backups to another location or to the cloud for long-term retention and cost optimization.

These backups become essential if something happens to your databases, or if you need to access the data for secondary purposes without impacting production.

There are three different types of Microsoft SQL Server backups:

Full backup: This is a complete copy of everything in the database, and it serves as a foundation for other backup types.
Differential backup: This type of backup contains all the changes that were made to the database since the most recent full backup. This has the advantage of a quicker recovery time, requiring only a full backup and the last differential backup to restore the entire Microsoft SQL database.
Transaction logs backup: This type of backup copies the transaction logs, which contain the whole history of modifications to the Microsoft SQL database. If you need to recover a database to a certain point in time, you can use this type of backup.