Use Extractor Utility with Litespeed Backups

Can I restore Litespeed backups on the server that does not have Litespeed installed? The answer is ‘Yes, you can.’  Litespeed provides an Extractor.exe utility that allows extracting Litespeed backups to native SQL Server backups, so that you can restore the converted native backups on any SQL Servers without Litespeed installation required.

There is a simple example. I used ‘Exetractor.exe’ to convert a 5GB Litespeed backup to the native backup that is about 34.5 after extracting from the local disk drive (Sample: U:\MSSQL\Backup) to the backup folder on a share server (Sample: \\lofmcdfiler01\sql_backups).

Step 1  Extract Litespeed backup to native backup

On the server, open Command Prompt and navigate the directory to where extractor utility stored. In my case, it’s under ‘C:\Program Files\Quest Software\LiteSpeed\SQL Server’. And then type command:

extractor.exe -F (Path where Litespeed backup is) -E (Path where you would like to extract the backup)

Step 2 Restore the extracted native backup on to another server

You would normally see 7 new bak files in the destination folder from ‘*.bak0’ to ‘*,bak6’. And all 7 bak files need to be restored together, in order to complete database restore.

RESTORE DATABASE [DBA_TEST]

FROM DISK = '\\lofmcdfiler01\sql_backups\Litespeed_Sample_Extract.bak0',

DISK = '\\lofmcdfiler01\sql_backups\Litespeed_Sample_Extract.bak1',

DISK = '\\lofmcdfiler01\sql_backups\Litespeed_Sample_Extract.bak2',

DISK = '\\lofmcdfiler01\sql_backups\Litespeed_Sample_Extract.bak3',

DISK = '\\lofmcdfiler01\sql_backups\Litespeed_Sample_Extract.bak4',

DISK = '\\lofmcdfiler01\sql_backups\Litespeed_Sample_Extract.bak5',

DISK = '\\lofmcdfiler01\sql_backups\Litespeed_Sample_Extract.bak6'

With Recovery ,

MOVE ' Litespeed_Sample' TO 'D:\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\Litespeed_Sample _Data.mdf',

Move ' Litespeed_Sample_LOG' TO 'F:\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\LOG\Litespeed_Sample _Log.ldf'

Go

You can also use GUI to restore the backups by specifying the multiple backup files.

Note

If you try to extract a fairly big size of Litespeed backup, that you will need to consider the time and space issue. It took me about 24 minutes to complete a 5GB Litespeed file to 34.5GB native backup files. Of course, it’s also related the network speed, as I used a shared server as the destination.