bitbucket-25253 (12/18/2008)
WebrunnerIt helped me, in the sense that I was reminded that you can't take a backup of a snapshot
I suggest you go to BOL (The link is in my previous post), which says you can backup a snapshot. True it is 3rd party software, but SQL 2005 contains built in specific capability to allow the 3rd party software to perform a back up of a snapshot.
So can a snapshot be backed up or not. Certainly not using SSMS or other SQL tools generally available to a DBA, but it can be backed up..
No, a snapshot can't be backed up.
A snapshot backup of a database is not a backup of a database snapshot, it's yet another backup[ mechanism and yet another differnet use of the word "snapshot" (to go alongside database snapshot and replication snapshot) and yet another useul point-in-time view of a database (to go alongside database snapshot and shared scalable database).
When I say a database snapshot can't be backed up, I don't mean that it's impossible to take a copy of the sparse data (by splitting a mirror or whatever means you like) but I do mean that that copy is NOT a backup from which you can ever restore the snapshot database, ie it's not a backup at all.
Tom