Question About Transaction Logs

[txdave35]

Can someone tell me the benefit if any of backing up the transaction log if the database is receiving very little daily activity?

I have a maintenance plan that does a full backup and trn backup at the same time, once per day. It seems rather pointless to backup the transaction log.

 

[JayKusch]

TLog backups are used for "Point in time" restores.

Thus, you if you DB had an issue during the day, you could restore the last full backups and then all TLog backups after the full.

The frequency of the TLog backups (being an hour, 1/2 hour, 15 minutes as example) is the amount of info you are will to loose.

So as an example you have a full backup at 2a and TLog backups every hour ... and say your DB crashes at 1:35p then you would be able to recover the DB all the way up to 1p when the last TLog happened.

If you do not need this kind of recovery, put your DB in Simple mode and forego the TLog backups (which will fail with an error anyways if the DB is in Simple mode).



Thanks

J. Kusch