Have an option to automatically write a SQL database backup to App_Data/<database_name>.bak (just like clicking the "backup" button now), except rather than error out if the file exists, have it stomp any existing backups. I can then just automate my FTP utility to pull down *.bak from that folder to my local machine to keep my own backups. Having to manually clean out App_Data, then manually go to each db in the control panel, and click "backup" for each one is not a solution. I want to keep daily backups of my SQL dbs, but I'm not going to manually do that mundane task every day. That's why we have computers. I'm not asking for much (IMO) - just: auto-click the "backup" button each night for each of my SQL dbs stomp any existing files rather than erroring out. You can exclude App_Data from your internal backups of our web data to reduce your backup storage requirements. Thanks
Two issues here; backing up every database to a customer accessible directory every 24 hours would have a negative impact on web server resources, and it would also be a redundant operation (on our end) since we already back up every database every 24 hours for our own disaster recovery backups (that live outside of the web servers). Secondly, automatically overwriting anything in a customer accessible directory is never a good idea, so we avoid it where possible. I can get behind what you're trying to do, and I think it's a good idea - on a per user level, but not globally. We're always looking at ways to provide user-level access to automated backups, so as soon as we can find a reasonable way to do it, it's something we're likely to incorporate. But I can't really give an idea of exactly when that might come about.
Its complicated. For every customer that wants to delete the old backup automatically, there is another that wants to keep it.
Well I guess what it boils down to is that I want an automated way to get a local copy of my SQL databases. However that is achieved isn't that important. It's great that you have nightlies, but since I (the customer) don't have access to them, they don't exist to me. Is there a way we can get read-only access to your nightlies? Have you checked out Red-Gate hyperbac? (http://www.red-gate.com/products/dba/sql-hyperbac/) It's somewhat pricey, but greatly reduces the backup footprint as well as the bandwidth required to move the backups around (say like over SFTP )
Overwriting existing backups I would also like to see the ability to at least be prompted to overwrite the existing backup if an existing SQL Server backup already exists in the App_Data folder. For example, if an existing .bak file was found, a message box or dialog stating "A file already exists with the same name in the App_Data directory, would you like to overwrite?" If the user clicks Yes, the backup would be overwritten, otherwise, it would be left alone and the backup would not occur.
We are looking at Red Gate for something else that isn't necessarily related. They have a lot of good stuff, but as you mentioned, their licensing can be costly. That's something that might be more feasible in the short term. I'll bring it up at the next meeting.
The developers are going to look into this, but I'm not sure if/when it might be implemented. It's on their plate as a suggestion anyway.
Unique Backup file names Another possibility would be to append a date and time stamp to the name of each backup file so that each backup file would be uniquely name and therefore not encounter conflicts when creating multiple backups.
