So tell me if this is a fantasy or a reality about restore backups: You are on a beach, sipping on your cocktail and looking at the sea when you get a frantic call from your boss, “One of the junior DBAs has just deleted all of the data from a critical database”. You say “Hold on”, switch to a browser on your smartphone, go to your dashboard on SqlBak.com and click a Restore button on your latest transaction log backup. In a few seconds, you get back to your boss and say: “I have fixed it”. Your boss is stunned, thinking you are a magician and makes a note to give you a raise and a bonus while you continue enjoying the beach…
Well, the beach and the pay raise are a fantasy, but restoring your database in a couple of clicks through just a browser on your smartphone is a service you can use today – it is called SqlBak.
This is how it looks like – you select a backup job, click Restore and the latest backup will be restored to your SQL Server:
Let’s see how to make it works
First – boring stuff: go through 10 seconds signup with your Facebook, Twitter or Google account. Then (and here’s the secret to a magic of SqlBak working through a browser) – download and install a small service program to run on your SQL Server computer – SqlBak Client.
To connect this program to your SqlBak account, enter your “Secret Key” from SqlBak Dashboard
into the SqlBak Client (it will prompt you for it):
The service program (SqlBak Client) has practically no interface and after connecting it to your SqlBak account you can forget about it (it will also auto-update). All of the configuration, monitoring and restore interface will be online through SqlBak.com, not through the program directly.
Now the fun part begins.
Go to the SqlBak Dashboard and click “Add New Job” button. Select the computer where you have previously installed and connected the SqlBak Client and authenticate with the SQL Server – exactly like you’d do in SSMS.
Press Continue and you get to the Job Settings page. Select the databases you want to backup:
Then Press “Add Backup Destinations” to select where you want to store the backups – you have an option of sending it to you Local/Network folder, FTP, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, MS OneDrive or Azure Storage:
I’ve selected to send backups to Amazon S3 and a Network Folder:
Lets schedule the full backup to run every 6h and differential backup every 1 hours:
By default it takes standard backup files and compresses them to zip – lets keep it like that:
You would probably want to receive a confirmation email at least on any failure – so fill out that field:
Now save the job and press Run Now to see if everything runs correctly:
You would see a log like this:
Now we can forget about it – it will email us if anything is wrong. If we get back to it in a few days – heres what we would see a backup history like this:
For each successful backup you have the Download and Restore buttons. Let’s click on the Restore buttons to restore one of the Differential backup. Select the destination to restore from (Amazon S3 or a network folder in our case):
You will see a restore progress bar:
In a few minutes your database is restored.
Absolutely brilliant! I know of no other product that would allow me to do the same from just a browser. It took quite a few pictures to describe the process, but in reality it takes just a few minutes and pretty self-explanatory.
In addition to backups this service would monitor that your SQL Server is alive and would email you if it goes offline – very useful.
Companies that want to provide Sql Server private label backups themselves can configure the service so it is branded to their company.
Some companies with strict security requirements may be hesitant of storing SQL Server login credentials with SqlBak. I’ve contacted the developers and they have told me that they are working on a version that would give user a choice of entering login credentials on the client – this way they would never leave the SQL Server.
Conclusion: I have seen many SQL backup programs before, but I am seriously impressed with the ease of using SqlBak – the only SQL backup software where you can configure, monitor and restore backups right from the browser.
If you enter the promo code Pinal2015 on the Sign Up page and you will receive $20 credit to your account.
Published by Pinal Dave on SQLAuthority. More of my work at pinaldave.com.
