Continuing in my series on the Red Gate Backup Pro 7.2 utility for SQL Server, I tried yesterday rather unsuccessfully to set up a development server to do all of my virtual restores in order to verify all of my backups for my production servers.  It works great on this particular development server for the backups on this particular server.  However, the ability to do this across servers is complicated with a complex array of directions with advanced security options that really obfuscates a simple idea.  Can it be done, Red Gate says yes with their directions provided on their website amongst them this link and this link in addition to their security model.

Maybe I have missed something, I am not sure.  But it looks to me that the security is far more advanced than it needs to be for the idea of a ‘virtual restore’ and I do not want a simple AD account to have so many privileges.  Maybe I will step back and approach it again after the holidays.

However, if that falls through I will just set this up on each production server.  I am also trying to script all of these virtual restores into a single script that grabs all of the databases instead of hard coding each individual database in the script.  This will automate my maintenance such that when new databases are created, I will not have to worry about setting them up in the restore script.    I have some ideas but have not been able to get them to work yet.  Press on and enjoy!