Hi all,
I'm very inexperienced so be gentle :-). I have to guarantee that backups I do satisfy a certain requirement. A DBA from a partner company has told me how to do what I need. His understanding seems to conflict with Microsoft's documentation.
My intent is to do a full backup each night. I need to keep the backups for the last 7 days. This is not about disaster recovery. Rather it's about rewinding user activities for a period of days. So I want full backups from Sunday night, Saturday night,
Friday night, etc. Both the DBA's databases and my database use the simple recovery model.
The DBA gave me the command that they run every night:
BACKUP DATABASE [DB1] TO DISK = N'D:\SQL2008\Backup\DB1.bak'
WITH RETAINDAYS = 7, NOFORMAT, INIT, NAME = N'DB1-Full Database
Backup', SKIP, NOREWIND, NOUNLOAD, STATS = 10
My doubts and confusion are about the INIT and SKIP parameters. From how I read the documentation SKIP means to ignore the RETAINDAYS flag and INIT means to overwrite the backup data that's already in the file. That seems to suggest that only the last night's backup is available.
I'd appreciate any thought and clarity you all might have.
Bob