D. Clark (6/26/2012)
I couldn't agree more. The devs before me used maintenance plans, but I am actually planning on getting away from them. My biggest gripe so far is that if I modify a job associated with a maintenance plan (like adding a step to invoke a script to compress and copy backups) then I went back and modified the maintenance plan, I would find that the maintenance plan would restore the job to how it was before I made my changes to the job. Maybe there is a better way to do this, but right now I am just trying to stabilize everything. Plus, it just works.
Also agreed; personally, I like a slightly customized version of Ola Hallengren's backup scripts[/url].
As with all backups, the real trick is to successfully and regularly test restoring them (preferably to a different database instance).