How useful is your backup?

A backup is worth nothing, if you can’t utilize it for restore.

You probably agree with this well known word of wisdom, don’t you?

This week I had to learn another aspect - the hard way: There are many cases that may require a restore. Only one of those cases is recovering a database from a state of failure. Another situation may require access to legacy data of a meanwhile deactivated database, a database that doesn’t exist anymore. In this case only a successful restore from an older backup, although necessary, may not be sufficient. Here’s the story, why.

I was called by a customer who requested me to pull out two documents from a legacy (SQL Server 2000) database. We found an 8 year old backup we could rely on and restore worked well. Great! But then we discovered the documents had been stored in an IMAGE column and nobody had an idea how it had been encoded at the time it was stored. We soon recognized that we need the original application to get access to the documents, only to recognize that nobody had an idea where to find the installation package. Eventually I could find an 8 year old backup which included the old VB6 code. I could have used this code to rebuild the application and also an installation package only with considerable difficulties, because:

• The application uses some ActiveX components that I may not be able to find anymore.
• The original application run on Windows NT, so I may have to install this OS first, including the required service pack. Even if I find the installation CDs; I doubt, I will be able to find the appropriate device drivers but maybe, I can set up a virtual machine.
• I had to install Visual Studio 6, including the latest service pack and I had no idea where to find the installation CDs.
• The application may rely on deprecated SQL Server 2000 features. So I have to have a SQL Server 2000 installation on which the existing backup has to be restored. If it gets worse, I might even have to install the appropriate service pack to make the application working. I have no idea which service pack this would be, so there’s a chance I have to experiment.

I recognized that all those steps require a big effort and will take some days to accomplish. If only we had built a virtual machine of at least one legacy client system before replacing all client PCs by newer machines…

So, I’d modify the introductory statement like this:

A backup is worth nothing, if you can’t utilize the data that is contained inside this backup.