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Are you Cloud-hosted and maintaining your own, inhouse SQL backups?

Diana Gray

We just received notice concerning Blackbaud's upgrade to SQL Server 2019, which was meant especially for clients who are cloud-hosted who also maintain an inhouse SQL Server for backups (which also allows them the ability to quickly restore data if needed. Alternatively, you will need to ask Blackbaud for a backup, and this may take a week).

This prompted a discussion at my organization about the value of keeping backed-up data inhouse for quick restores and redundancy.

I've been asked to survey my Blackbaud colleagues to see what they are doing, and if you have the time, the rationale.

Thanks for your help!

Diana

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Donna Wolfgeher

That email has my colleagues all up and wondering what it means. I reached out to our IT person and he suggested I call Blackbaud to find out (I told him there's no number to call Blackbaud and get any response.) He would know if we are doing backups In house but we do not, I guess I wasn't even aware that anyone who is hosted has been maintaining their own SQL Server backups.

Diana Gray

Hi Donna,

Thank you for your reply, and sorry for the delayed response! I didn't receive much of a response from the Blackbaud Community, but I did get some feedback from the LA Data Roundtable and a few from the Facebook user group. The overall consensus is that maintaining an onsite backup server in addition to the Cloud backup maintained by BB is unweildly and unnecessary. Below, are comments that came in from the Roundtable group:

Response 1

"We've been hosted on site over the years and have backed up our data daily. But with our recent upgrade to NXT, this prompted us to think about local backups as well.

After a call with BB, we've discovered that asking for a backup is typically out of necessity and if your server is not setup with SQL 2019, you would need to purchase a $200 environment to run your backup on a local instance of RE and export any data that you need. That environment is also temporary, I believe you'll have a month if you purchase.

As far as I know, ever since we've had RE, we have never needed to run off a backup due to data corruption or compromised data. Also, the backup process doesn't seem to be as efficient as we'd hoped and for those reasons we have decided to rely on BB housing our data."

Response 2

Our database is still self-hosted on premises so our situation is different. We have a backup made every night.

It seems to me waiting an entire week for a backup is a week's worth of work lost. I guess it depends on how a week's wait might impact your workflow.

I've worked on our database since 2004. Since that time, we've had to access our backup once. It might seem like overkill, but we were sure glad we could call up that backup quickly and not miss a beat in our workflow.

Response 3

Hi Diana,
We do not maintain an in-house back up and I have never needed to request a backup from Blackbaud (knock on wood!) in all my 20+ years in RE.
So I don't think it would be something I would spend any money or time on, however, in the event you need it - sure would be nice to have it quickly accessible!

Shannon

Hope this helped!

Diana

Donna Wolfgeher

Thanks for
getting back! I appreciate this information. I think we’ll stick
with RE housing everything.

Donna
Wolfgeher

Executive
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