Question : MS SQL 2005 backup strategy with Transaction Log handling

I designed a backup strategy with weekly FULL userDB backups and daily DIFFerential userDB backups. My DBs use the Full recovery model, and I'm using Maintenance plans for this. Evidently after several weeks my Transaction Log files are gigantic and hard drive space is near full.

Reading on previous questions about this apparently has made me realize I am missing backing up the Transaction Logs.

It looks like I should probably run daily FULL userDB backups and hourly TRANSACTION LOG userDB backups between full backups to allow "point-in-time" recovery. The following questions are still unanswered from the articles I've read:

1- What should be the backup strategy for the systemDBs?
2- If I want the ability to have a "point-in-time" recovery of my DBs within the last 15 days, what should be the retention policy on the backup files? Append or Overwrite?
3- Will the hourly Transaction Log backups flush the transactions from the files and therefore releasing the space used?
4- If the answer to question 3 is NO, then How can I automate the transaction log flushing once they are backed up? (at the hourly job or at the daily full backup -- Whatever the best practice is)

Thanks in advace!

-xt

PS. Since my current transaction logs are so big and never being backed up, I'd like to run a full backup and flush them immediately before I run out of space. How can I do this?

Answer : MS SQL 2005 backup strategy with Transaction Log handling

>> 1- What should be the backup strategy for the systemDBs?

Just make sure that they are included in your Full backups and if any major changes are done to master or model or msdb database then backup it up once the change is done. No need to include them in Diff or Transactional log backups.

>> 2- If I want the ability to have a "point-in-time" recovery of my DBs within the last 15 days, what should be the retention policy on the backup files? Append or Overwrite?

In your maintenance plan, just add Maintenance cleanup task and specify delete files older than 15 days which would do. Would prefer backing it to separate files instead of a single backup set.
And if you prefer single backup set, then you need to Append and then specify retention duration as 15 days.

>> 3- Will the hourly Transaction Log backups flush the transactions from the files and therefore releasing the space used?

Transactional log backup helps re-using of ldf files and thus will help transactional log files (LDF files) to grow to a huge value. Once transactional log backup is taken, ldf file would be re-used or overwritten with the new transactions except for the active or un-committed transactions.

>> 4- If the answer to question 3 is NO, then How can I automate the transaction log flushing once they are backed up? (at the hourly job or at the daily full backup -- Whatever the best practice is)

It would flush out or in other words allow overwriting of data in ldf file excluding active transactions or uncommitted transactions. and this would be marked as inactive in your next transactional log backup and hence no need to worry about this.

>> Since my current transaction logs are so big and never being backed up, I'd like to run a full backup and flush them immediately before I run out of space. How can I do this?

Make sure this shrink is a one time activity and follow the steps below:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907511
http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/dennis/archive/2007/02/28/shrink-your-sql-2005-transaction-logfiles.aspx

If you are chaning recovery model to simple then make sure that it is changed back to Full following a Full backup.