Backups backups and more backups, but how often are those backups tested?
At a client we reviewed their SQL backups and it turns out the previous provider had for some reason set each SQL backup to expire after a week.
We corrected that issue as an expiration was not required, we also found that they had never tested any of their backups with a full restore to see if they were good backups.
That being said, I am creating an environment to do test restores of each backup done. With most of the backups being fairly small, with one larger 36G one (looking to trim the size) I had hoped to automate as much of the process as possible.
In a perfect world:
1. Copy backups from file server to Restore environment
2. Import database into SQL
3. Work it's magic
4. Notification of restore if successful or failed
5. Empty database of restore and leave system...