Unless there is absolutely another reason to do otherwise, which i have to this point i have yet to find in the 10+ years have been doing SQL...

- One maintenance plan to do Full Backups on ALL databases on a daily basis. This

will do system and user databases. When a new database is added it will be

automatically backed up and to the same place as the others. Have a plan as

to how many days to keep and use maintenance plan to delete anything older

than that.

- One maintenance plan to do recurring Translog backups (say every hour). Set

this to ALL databases. It will skip databases in SIMPLE mode. Keep as many days

as the Full Backups.

- Another maintenance plan to do other tasks (say weekly), like check database

integrity, clean up history (very important. have seen performance hits from

leaving years of history data), reorg indexes, statistics.

Be sure to monitor that these jobs are running and are successful by using databasemail and having a way (system monitor) to alert if the SQLAgent service is not running.

Keep it simple until absolutely have to do otherwise.

John