I'm formatting my mirrored drives and installing a third drive for
raid 5 to add more space. I have backup exec. Can anyone tell me the
best way to backup SQL so I can be sure it will restore properly? I
was thinking of using imaging software and creating an image to a USB
2.0 hard drive. The DB is 80 gigs.

Thanks

[quoted text, click to view]

These articles may help:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314546&Product=sql2k
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;224071&Product=sql2k

Simon

Hi

If this is a production system then if you currently do not have a method of
regular backups then you should invest in a tape drive. Raid 5 will only
give you a certain level of protection (and it will slow things down as you
will be doing multiple writes!!), but it will not cover all possible
failures.

John

[quoted text, click to view]

I just wanna say thanks to everyone for the responses.
Everything went well and there are now 4 drives installed doing RAID
5.
Here are the details of what I was working with and what I did.

I have a Dell Poweredge 2600 with a PERC 4/Di RAID controller.
I had previously installed a 300GB Maxtor USB 2.0 drive, which I
backed up to using Veritas Backup exec with the SQL agent. It took
over 4 hours for 120GB.

I then installed four new drives and created a RAID 5 array alongside
the existing RAID 0 array and made the new array bootable. I booted
from Acronis True Image version 8 and it recognized the RAID
controller and the existing RAID 0 array as well as the new RAID 5
array. I did a disk clone with resizing of the partitions from the
RAID 0 array to the RAID 5 array. It took a little over an hour for
120 Gigabytes. I shut down the server and removed the old drives and
rebooted. Windows 2000 server loaded up and everything worked
perfectly without a single error.

I guess there are other ways this could have been done, but this
worked out just fine for me. I was impressed with the Acronis product
for its support of the RAID controller as well as its reliability. I
kept expecting something to go wrong with the imaging process and I
thought I would have to do a disaster recovery, but acronis true image
handled it without a single problem.

Thanks again
NH


[quoted text, click to view]