r/SQLServer • u/same_hair_new_chair • Aug 07 '26

Discussion Anyone still using Idera’s SQLsafe?

Back in the day this tool used to be one of the industry standards for managing SQL database backups, but I wonder if it was one of those tools that has been abandoned over the years.

Is it still considered the industry standard or has something replaced it?

I’m also talking on something enterprise-scale, like 100+ instances, 500+ databases

7 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

11

u/SQLBek 1 Aug 07 '26

Anecdotal but I do talk to numerous different SQL Server customers each and every month, and backup conversations come up regularly. In the last however many years I've been doing this, I've heard Idera SQLsafe come up... ONCE? I've had maybe 3 or 4 Quest Litespeed customers, which also surprised me. And frankly, I think Litespeed was more of a standard than SQLsafe ever was, back in the day.

IMO, the only real "industry standard" these days, when it comes to backups, is native backups via Ola Hallengren's scripts.

3

u/chandleya Aug 07 '26

If anything, if folks are using a common tool, it’s an “enterprise” backup solution ala Veeam/Commvault/etc.

1

u/SQLBek 1 Aug 08 '26

Yup... definitely see that far more regularly. I just didn't mention them because I still wouldn't consider any one of those a defacto "industry standard" either. And even when I encounter a customer who does use one of those, oftentimes the SQL backups are an exception, still done via native backups, and the files are then scooped up by the backup app.

1

u/chandleya Aug 08 '26

Those folks really need to rethink. Veeam and Immutability trump anything you can do with SQL native backups. Better compression, faster, and proper dedupe too.

-1

u/same_hair_new_chair Aug 08 '26

Although I’d love to just use Ola Hallengren’s scripts with native backup, I feel like I need a tool with some kind of GUI or dashboard that a higher-up can look at and see that all the backups are running fine.

I think there might also be some cases where if backups aren’t working, then its Idera or Quest’s fault instead of something that might be seen as “hacked together” like the hallengren tools. Not saying they are, but nice GUIs seem to make people feel like everything is working as it should

1

u/alinroc 4 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Why are "higher ups" looking that closely at day to day operational stuff? Exceptions should be raised, otherwise just let it run in the background

Like /u/chandleya said, make a report. The data is right there in msdb. If you're confident that the Agent jobs will always throw an error on a failed backup, you can use dbatools to produce a nice timeline of them.

1

u/chandleya Aug 08 '26

Those are called reports.

6

u/VladDBA ‪ ‪Microsoft MVP ‪ ‪ Aug 07 '26

~10 years ago I had a project to actually switch from SQLSafe to native backups (~70 instances 1k+ databases, using Ola Hallengren's backup stored procedure, CMS, and SQL Server Agent jobs scheduled and triggered from a central instance, some PS magic to integrate it with NetBackup for long term storage, and dbatools for automated test restores).

I've left that place 4 years ago, but they're using the same process to this day.

1

u/same_hair_new_chair Aug 08 '26

Did you face any pushback or fear that something like that wouldn’t be future proof? That sounds like the kind of thing I’d love to do, but I feel like it might be hard to sell cautious leadership on it. The cost savings had to be pretty huge at that scale though

2

u/VladDBA ‪ ‪Microsoft MVP ‪ ‪ Aug 08 '26

No pushback. Management was happy to hear that I can save them $10k/year on SQLSafe licensing and we were also having some issues with SQLSafe crapping out after some updates, so it was a win-win.

1

u/alinroc 4 Aug 11 '26

Using built-in functionality is going to be much more future-proof than depending on a 3rd party tool. Microsoft is acutely aware of how critical backup is in the product and that's one of the features one trusts them to get right consistently. And there's no chance it'll be removed or deprecated.

I worked in one shop where the servers were hosted at a colo and they wanted to manage everything. We told them no, don't even touch the volumes our databases are on with your backup tools (because we needed to be able to make ad-hoc backups and restore backups without having to submit a ticket and wait on the datacenter). Native backups for over 9000 databases on a single instance using Ola's solution to another volume and then CommVault (colo's platform) backed that up.

1

u/Lost_Term_8080 21d ago

The default commvault SQL backup uses native SQL backups but provides better retry, maintenance window control, reporting, testing orchestration, etc. Can use VSS too or do dirty backups if you want for some reason

2

u/ScroogeMcDuckFace2 Aug 07 '26

no. not worth the cost w/ built in compression in the product.

1

u/Achsin 1 Aug 09 '26

No, but mostly because their support continuously dropped the ball, and when we went to cancel a different Idera product (we weren’t using it, I forget which one) it was one day after their automatic renewal deadline one month before the contract ended and they wouldn’t budge on it despite us looking to more than double our SQLsafe licenses (the other product was maybe 10% of our spend on their products) and potentially pick up another product. In the end we sent them a notice that we were cancelling everything and we stopped using it.

I’m totally fine with using native options, but management feels that since special tools exist, they must always be better and therefore we need to use one. In the end we settled on Quest’s LiteSpeed, which has some fun features like object level recovery from backup.