Jamie Scharbrough (10/17/2012)
I agree with everyone who's said you need to be concerned about recovery, but I also understand where you're coming from.I'd say a weekly full (I like Sunday nights, myself, just for simplicity's sake), a daily, and an hourly would be good.
But I'd also run them in a test environment and make sure they can be restored completely without issue.
I agree as well - recovery is the ultimate goal, but once again, I can't even attempt a recovery if I haven't made a backup, and I can't make a regularly scheduled backup if I don't have some sort of plan. Testing restores is all well and good, but that comes AFTER having made a backup, to ensure that the backup was done correctly, and that it's useable.
Simplicity was exactly my thought - with a small database, does mixing full, differential and transaction backups make sense, or is it unnecessarily complicated? Obviously, a full backup once per minute would be the simplest from a recovery standpoint, but that's hardly practical.
You think, then, that such a cascaded full/differential/transaction approach makes sense, even given the situation I've described? If so, may I ask for your reasoning on the matter? It appears overly complex to me, but maybe I'm missing something, which is, after all, why I posted my original question.