Introduction

I’ve been running a small web hosting company for around 7 years now. One of the biggest requests I get from my customers is to download a backup of their Microsoft SQL Server (MS SQL) databases or restore a backup from one they’ve developed locally. If you’re familiar with this scenario, you know this can be a tedious task if done manually, especially if you have multiple servers in a distributed hosting environment.

For example, if you haven’t automated any of your MS SQL backup/restore processes and the customer requests a backup of a SQL database, you’ve got to then log into the database server, run a backup of their database from SQL Management Studio, then copy the file over to the user’s FTP root so they can download it. While not terribly bad, it does take time and it’s a little inconvenient for all involved.

But that’s the easy part. The tediousness comes into play when a customer requests a restore of a database file they’ve given you if, say, they’ve transferred hosts. Hopefully, they provided you with either a valid backup file (.BAK) to restore or both the data file and log file (.MDF/.LDF) so you can attach their database into your SQL Server. Once you have the proper file, you can proceed with the restore. If you’re restoring a .BAK file, then you’ve got user synchronization issues to deal with once the DB is restored. If you’re attaching the database, you need to make sure the right DB user is selected when you attach so they can access their database. Either way, it’s more work than you probably can or want to deal with on a regular basis.

If you don’t feel like dealing with that, your other option is to provide the user with the ability to backup and restore directly through SQL Management Studio. Usually, though, this means they need to have elevated privileges,and with that they could end up with greater freedoms than hosts want to contend with.

We found the solution to these problems with myLittleTools myLittleBackup. myLittleBackup was developed to specifically allow users to easily perform backups and restores of their Microsoft SQL 2000, 2005, and 2008 databases through a simple web-based interface. They can also store and download a customizable number of backups, and restore from either their desktop or their stored backups. Furthermore, it handles all the database user synchronization issues (such as orphaned users) that you once had to do manually. Over the last year using this product, I can safely say it has saved our staff and customers countless hours of back and forth when backing up and restoring Microsoft SQL Server databases.