From: Mark.Powell2@hp.com   
      
   On Friday, December 6, 2013 5:41:08 PM UTC-5, Erland Sommarskog wrote:   
   > Chad Jones (noreply@noreply.com) writes:   
   >    
   > > Yes, I have no access to the tape backups or the tape backup    
   >    
   > > device so that is not an option.  I do however have a full copy    
   >    
   > > of SQL Server 2008 R2 running on my dev machine.  It is a    
   >    
   > > trivial matter for me to restore a .bak file from another    
   >    
   > > server on to my dev server.  Which is why I was asking about    
   >    
   > > the 'Backup Database' permission.  I have full R/W on the other    
   >    
   > > server but no 'Backup Database' permission.  I'm sure the dba's    
   >    
   > > wouldn't give it to me if I asked for it because of the    
   >    
   > > aforementioned restrictions on the tape device.  Even the dba's    
   >    
   > > don't have full access to the tape device.  I was hoping that    
   >    
   > > if they could give me permission to backup to disk only that    
   >    
   > > would be the way to go.  I don't even want to ask these guys to    
   >    
   > > run a script for me to backup to a disk location.  Whatever    
   >    
   > > solution I find has to be something I can run myself.  Thanks   
   >    
   >    
   > Hm, do you know for sure that they have a tape device? I don't work   
   >    
   > in operations, so I don't know how common tape devices are today,    
   >    
   > but if I were to set up a backup (well restore) strategy for a database,   
   >    
   > I would certainly not add any tape devices to the mix, at least not   
   >    
   > as the primary backup target. (Possibly copy the backup file on disk    
   >    
   > to tape in a second step.)   
   >    
   >    
   > And even if there is a tape device, I don't see why the DBAs would not   
   >    
   > give you permission because of the tape device. Certainly, if I was a    
   >    
   > DBA, and a random developer would ask for permissions to backup    
   >    
   > databases on a production server, or even a test/QA server, I would not   
   >    
   > do this lightly. If you have a legit reason to have a copy of the    
   >    
   > database, I would rather take the backup myself, and put it somewhere   
   >    
   > you can read it.   
   >    
   > --    
   >    
   > Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, esquel@sommarskog.se   
      
   This is a little late but on the question of how common tape devices are   
   today, I would say very common in larger shops though the device may not   
   appear to be tape to the source.  Our Windows team install software on our   
   Windows servers that dumps    
   changed files to a tape on a daily basis.  The tape unit is actually a set of   
   disks in front of several tape drives.  The tape management system dumps the   
   disk contents to tape.  Physical files are stripped across tape units.    The   
   total data store is    
   in the hundreds of T-bytes.  That would be a lot of disk.   
      
   HTH -- Mark D Powell --   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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