Automate SQL Server 2008 backup and restore on shared hosting with limited permissions

Question

I have a windows virtual private server (VPS) Windows Server 2012, with SQL Server 2008, on which I have complete access to the Production database for my web application. This allows me to use SQLBackupAndFTP to backup the database and place it on my mirror hosting, which is a shared hosting with limited privileges (no restore privilege).

I want to automatically restore the mirror server database every night to the copy of the production database.

The mirror server is used as a fall back in case the production server was to ever go, we would could at a minimum restore to last nights production environment.

How can I achieve this given I have limited permissions?

I have no access to the shared hosting via RDP, or SSH etc.

Answer 1

In case you don’t have full access to SQL Server and the machine that is running it you can’t really initiate a restore command (maybe there are some workarounds but I’m not familiar with any).

What you can do if SQL Server is on a public IP address is setup some kind of replication between two servers so they synchronize automatically. Again, not sure if this is possible w/o full access to machine but you can give it a try.

Final solution would be to use one of the third party comparison and synchronization tools to synchronize databases at a given time. Just find a tool that has command line interface such as Data Diff from Apex. Another one you can use is Data Compare from Red Gate but I’m sure there must be others too.

Note that these tools are not free …