About Microsoft SQL Server Backup

IBM Cloud Supports the following MS SQL Server backups:

IBM Cloud® Backup and Recovery also supports VM-based Backup and SQL Native Backup.

VDI-based Backup

A IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery MS SQL VDI-based backup captures the native MS SQL server backups. It captures VDI-based backups of a specific database on a SQL Server instance running on a VMware or physical server.

The Virtual Device Interface (VDI) is a Microsoft interface that allows the Backup agent to execute SQL Server Native backup and restore commands. This backup type produces a standard SQL Server Native backup of type (.BAK), transaction logs, (.TRN), and differentials, (.DIFF). These backup files are stored on a IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery View and take advantage of View compression, deduplication, encryption, replication, and archiving features.

For information on performing MS SQL VDI-based back up, see, see Backup Microsoft SQL Server (VDI-based).

All configurations are for illustrative purposes only. IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery recommends following MS SQL best practices.

An example of MS SQL running on a Windows server that contains the following:

  • Multiple volumes, C, D and F in the figure below
  • Volume D is running multiple MS SQL databases
  • Volume F contains database logs

The MS SQL VDI-based backup task consists of the following actions:

  1. During an MS SQL protection run, a 'BACKUP DATABASE' command for the specified MS SQL databases is initiated using MS SQL Server Virtual Device Interface (VDI). The generated backup file is saved on the IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery with a date and time stamp.

  2. If the policy is configured to take incremental database backups, it translates to differential backups in case of VDI-based backup.

  3. If transaction log backups are specified in the policy, the database transaction logs are backed up to the IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery using MS SQL Server Virtual Device Interface (VDI). The logs allow you to roll back to a specific point in time. MS SQL Server automatically truncates the SQL logs after a successful SQL log backup and marks the Virtual Log Files (VLFs) for reuse.