Acronis Backup for Windows Server Essentials - User Guide - Manual (Page 303)

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12 Protecting Microsoft SQL Server with single-pass
backup
This section describes how to use single-pass disk and application backups to protect Microsoft SQL
Server data.
A single-pass backup operation creates an application-aware disk backup which enables browsing
and recovery of the backed-up application data without recovering the entire disk or volume. The
disk or volume can also be recovered as a whole. This means that a single solution and a single
backup plan can be used for both the disaster recovery and data protection purposes. The
application logs can be truncated after the backup, if necessary.
The single-pass backup functionality becomes available by installing Acronis Backup Agent for SQL.
Without this agent, you can protect your SQL Server data by using disk-level backup. For a detailed
description of this method, see the "Protecting applications with disk-level backup" (p. 279) section.
Protecting Microsoft SharePoint
A Microsoft SharePoint farm consists of front-end Web servers and machines with Microsoft SQL
Server. This means that the information presented in this section also applies to protecting Microsoft
SharePoint data.
For the recommendations specific to backing up the machines with SharePoint data, see the
"SharePoint data backup" (p. 289) section.
For information about recovering SharePoint data, see the "Recovering SharePoint data" (p. 298)
section.
12.1 General information
12.1.1 Agent for SQL
Single-pass backup of Microsoft SQL Server data becomes available by using Acronis Backup Agent
for SQL.
Backup
During a disk backup, Agent for SQL adds Microsoft SQL Server metadata to the resulting backup file.
By using this metadata, Acronis Backup detects and catalogues SQL Server databases. After the
backup is successfully completed, the agent truncates the SQL Server transaction log if the
corresponding option in the backup plan has been set.
Recovery
The agent enables you to recover SQL databases directly to a running SQL Server instance. You can
make a database available to users immediately, or perform additional operations before making it
available.
The agent can also extract database files from a single-pass backup to a folder on a file system. These
files can be used for data mining or auditing. In case of emergency, you can attach these database
files to a SQL Server instance that is not managed by the agent.