Creating Database Back Ups

Good afternoon everyone! I hope you all had a lovely weekend!

Today's short blog post is going to cover how to create a back up from your database. You should always back up any active database on your server because it will safeguard your database (and yourself!) from losing any of your database and contents. 

Once you have created a back up, you can then restore completely (or even partially) to this back up. Sometimes, it's useful to use these back ups as a way of archiving old data. You never know when you may need to refer back to an archived application build and you will need the relevant database to go with it (as you know, databases can grow vastly in a very small period of time, from both a data point of view as well as database structure point of view). 

Creating a Full Database Back Up 

In order to create a back up, right click on your database instance and go to Tasks > Back Up...

You should see the following screen: 

Make sure that where you wish to back your data up to is the right place, and make sure that the file has a suitable name so you understand exactly what database has been backed up and when it was backed up. You can choose between 3 main back up types from the drop down list: 

• Full 
• Differential 
• Transaction Log

However different settings will provide an even wider range of back up types. Please see the link below for more details on them: 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175477.aspx

Once you have made your decisions on this page, always make sure the options are set up correctly as well: 

For this example, I am just going to leave the default options. You can choose to overwrite any existing back up sets and set up new media sets to save your database back up to, however for this example I won't need to do that. 

Once you are ready to go, press ok and you will see this appear in the progress bar: 

If, for whatever reason, you want to stop the back up, click on the "Stop action now" hyperlink. This will cause no negative effects to the database at all. 

Once the back up is complete you will see the following message: 

What Next...

And that really is all there is to it! Note that you can also create timed regular back ups and this example just shows how you can do it manually. Tomorrow I will be discussing how to restore from a database back up so stay tuned for that! 

As A Final Word...

Thank you for reading today's blog post! If you have any questions/comments/feedback, please leave them in the comments section below and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Alternatively, please like my SQL Genius Facebook Page and leave a message on there.