Day 1 of 31 – Introduction

Welcome to Day 1 of 31 days of posts on dbatools backup and restore capabilities.

Wait, that sounds like a lot of posts about dbatools backup and restores? Well, some years ago I did a similar series on standard PowerShell Backup and Restores, and all of that plus a lot more is now built into the dbatools module.

This means there’s a lot of power hidden in Backup-DbaDatabase and Restore-DbaDatabase, but that also means it’s easy to miss features and options. So 31 days is about right to cover everything I think

Currently it’s 1st May 2020, and we’re in a lockdown in the UK. Which you’d think means lots of freetime right? It’s not quite working out like that, so there may be a gap when real life takes over. But I’m going to try my best for a post every day for this month

Why me?

I wrote a lot of the Restore and Backup code, so I’ve got a good idea of how it hangs together and just why it was designed in certain ways. It wasn’t just to annoy people, there was a plan to offer some big power featured. Really!

About the examples

Just to prove the flexibility of things I’ll be using as many different versions of PowerShell and SQL Server to demo thing. If you want to follow along then Windows PowerShell 5.1 and Sql Server -gt 2008 will be fine.

Level

We’ll be starting off with simple concepts and examples, and then building on those. Most things we’ll be looking at won’t be to technical unless we’re inside the functions. If something doesn’t make sense, then please let me know and I’ll do my best to clear anything up.

So, that’s Day 1. Tomorrow we’ll begin by taking a look at the basics of Backup-DbaDatabase