[sims] SIMS Database in 'Full' Mode rather than 'Simple'?

[Wayne_K]

Does anyone have their SIMS Databses set in 'Full' Mode? Allowing restores from the Transaction Logs?

 

I can see the advantages of the 'Full' Mode but am unsure if it has any impact elsewhere? or if it is even supported by Capita?

[Greg]

We set all of ours to simple and use a .bak file to backup and restore.

 

Full will allow your ldf to grow huge without a maintenance plan.

 

It depends how granular you want to go with restores and how much time/space you have to throw at it. Our backup SLA is that we will restore from the previous day's backups.

[matt40k]

Does anyone have their SIMS Databses set in 'Full' Mode? Allowing restores from the Transaction Logs?

 

I can see the advantages of the 'Full' Mode but am unsure if it has any impact elsewhere? or if it is even supported by Capita?

 

Capita supports anything that works, that gives you a backup that you can restore from. They therefore recommend SIMPLE recovery mode and doing a FULL backup each day. If you only ever do a full backup - such as using dbAttach, I can't see why you would not want the recovery mode set to SIMPLE. Personally, I can do a full backup of a database in a few seconds and disc space isn't as much of an issue as it was so you could even do a full backup hourly! Admitting that'll be overkill, but at least you've got a simple recovery process, pick up file, restore, sorted.

 

I know Attix 5 say you need to have it set to the FULL recovery mode, but then that takes care of truncating the log file so it doesn't fill your disc.

[Wayne_K]

Does anyone have their SIMS Databses set in 'Full' Mode? Allowing restores from the Transaction Logs?

 

I can see the advantages of the 'Full' Mode but am unsure if it has any impact elsewhere? or if it is even supported by Capita?

 

 

Thanks for that Greg, we currently operate in the same manner but I was considering moving to 'Full' mode.

[rpwillis]

Capita supports anything that works, that gives you a backup that you can restore from. .

 

Whatever you use, do make sure that you regularly test restoring from backups. Otherwise you could find that the first time you find out it's not working correctly is when you actually need it.

[BKGarry]

We did have our SQL server set to full, but it was using up 200gb of HDD space with the LDF, so we had switched to simple.

 

We have a very comprehensive backup solution already, Full backups each night to tapes in the tapeloader and a batch file runs each night which backs up SIMS and FMS with the SIMS backup tools (cant remember its name off to top of my head but can check on monday) and then 2 hours later a batch file runs on a laptop (kept secure and encrypted with Truecrypt) which restores the database onto its own SIMS "server type" installation, so whenever the fire alarms sounds, the laptop is taken out, so if the worse case scenario every happens we can access information (up to a day old) that we can use on an emergency site (another local school) to get in contact with Parents and Staff and inform them of what is happening.