Hi Bren,

Thats exactly how I want my configuration - and I only have about 10Gb combined of databases and logs - and my databases and logs are also on different LUNs & volumes: 1 LUN for databases, 1 for logs, 1 for system dbs and 1 for snapinfo.

Can I ask a few questions:

- What version of SMSQL are you using? (I am using SQL2005 and SMSQL v5).

-  How long are you keeping your backups for?

- When you perform the tlog only backup every 15mins, does it not also make a snapshot of your snapinfo LUN?

     - if not, then how often do you make a snap of your snapinfo LUN, and how long do you keep them for?

(when I look at my filer, I can see hourly snapshots of my snapinfo vol because its snapped after every tlog backup - this is why I can't lower the tlog backup frequency to 15mins - I would simply eat up even more space on my filer).

- In SnapManager, under "Backup Settings|Transaction log backup" theres an option "Create Snapshot of snapinfo drive after after backup" - this is obviously my problem. I was told not to disable this though as it could affect my ability to restore!? How have you configured this option?

- Would it be possible for you to post your SQL job command strings here so I can compare them to mine - for both your tlog & full backup jobs?

Sorry for all the questions but I really appreciate the help nailing this. All the documentation but very few real-life examples on how to configure backups etc. We've been using SMSQL for a long time now, but it was originally configured by my NetApp consultants to only run a full backup at 00:00 every day - now I have a business critical database running on it   I needed to reduce potential data loss by running more frequent backups - which is when I hit all these issues. The easy answer is to oversize my volume to keep all these snapshots - but for 10Gb of data I am already taking up more than 160Gb of space on my filer for the various LUNs/vols mentioned above.

Cheers,

Marc

Hi Bren,

Maybe I am being stupid here, but I don't understand this. On my SQL2005 server agent, SMSQL has passed the following string to our SQL agent:

tlog job: C:\Program Files\NetApp\SnapManager for SQL Server\SmsqlJobLauncher.exe new-backup  –svr 'BNK-DB02'  -d  'BNK-DB02', '10', 'BAX40Production', 'BAX40test', 'BAX40Validation', 'INVOICES55', 'master', 'model', 'msdb', 'ReportServer', 'ReportServerTempDB', 'Servicedesk' -ver  –verInst 'BNK-DB02' -mp  –mpdir 'C:\Program Files\NetApp\SnapManager for SQL Server\SnapMgrMountPoint' -RetainBackupDays  4 -lgbkonly -bksif -RetainSnapofSnapInfoDays 2 -trlog  -noutm  –mgmt standard

full job: C:\Program Files\NetApp\SnapManager for SQL Server\SmsqlJobLauncher.exe new-backup  –svr 'BNK-DB02'  -d  'BNK-DB02', '10', 'BAX40Production', 'BAX40test', 'BAX40Validation', 'INVOICES55', 'master', 'model', 'msdb', 'ReportServer', 'ReportServerTempDB', 'Servicedesk' -ver  –verInst 'BNK-DB02' -mp  –mpdir 'C:\Program Files\NetApp\SnapManager for SQL Server\SnapMgrMountPoint' -RetainBackupDays  4 -lb -bksif -RetainSnapofSnapInfoDays 2 -trlog  -noutm  –mgmt daily

Its called "SmsqlJobLauncher.exe" in my jobs. Whats this "SmSqlBi.exe" used in yours? (different version of SQL server perhaps?).

From the above you can see that I keep 4 days of backups, and 2 days of Snapinfo snaps during this "testing period" that I am going through.

I am aiming for daily full backups, with at least hourly tlog backups throughout the day - but at the moment we are simply eating up too much space on our Filer to do this (4.5Gb of logs = 70Gb vol). And I only need to keep 4 days of backups and we have fairly small data change - so I have something misconfigured somewhere.

Any further news on this Bren?