It’s day 16 of my series 31 Days of Disaster Recovery. I’ve seen a lot of great DR related posts recently. I want to do kind of a round-up of some of the other must-read disaster recovery posts and articles out there.

• Last Time CheckDB was Run by Jason Brimhall (blog|@SQLRNNR). This post is important because knowledge is power. Especially if you may not be the one directly responsible for the integrity checks at your job. This is a quick way to check the last good DBCC integrity check for the database.
• Automated Backup Tuning by Nic Cain (blog|@SirSQL). You can get some good performance boost by tweaking the backup buffers, but you can also send backup performance in the toilet by tweaking it the wrong way. And it depends heavily on many factors so there is only one reliable way to determine the best settings: trial and error. Nic has automated that process for you and it runs the backup through various settings and graphs the performance differences for you so you can easily see which settings give you the best performance.
• Centralizing and Analyzing SQL Backup Pro Backup and Restore Data by Rodney Landrum (blog|@SQLBeat). It’s absolutely imperative that a DBA know the state of the backups on his servers. If you have a large number of servers, that can be a very daunting task. This process shows one way to automate this process and easily keep on top of a large number of servers.
• The SQL Server Instance That Will not Start by Gail Shaw (blog|@SQLInTheWild). This is a great article about the common problems you may face when rebooting SQL Server and it won’t start. If you haven’t already been there, you will be soon enough. Gail walks you through fixing several different common problems (which believe me is much better than reinstalling production in the heat of the moment).
• Everything by Paul Randal (blog|@PaulRandal). Okay, so I’m not referencing a particular blog post here, but if a week goes by without checking Paul’s blog, chances are pretty good that you missed something important. There’s no better source for learning deep internals on disaster recovery, DBCC, etc. Read it all. And then … read it again.

If you missed any of the earlier posts in my DR series, you can check them out here:

31 Days of disaster Recovery
1. Does DBCC Automatically Use Existing Snapshot?
2. Protection From Restoring a Backup of a Contained Database
3. Determining Files to Restore Database
4. Back That Thang Up
5. Dealing With Corruption in a Nonclustered Index
6. Dealing With Corruption in Allocation Pages
7. Writing SLAs for Disaster Recover
8. Resolutions for All DBAs
9. Use All the Checksums
10. Monitoring for Corruption Errors
11. Converting LSN Formats
12. Extreme Disaster Recovery Training
13. Standard Backup Scripts
14. Fixing a Corrupt Tempdb
15. Running DBCC CheckTable in Parallel Jobs