Okay, I think I've got a reasonable plan. I'll do a nightly full, and an hourly differential and 15-minute transaction log during the day. The last will be mostly for practice on my part, with the expectation that the hourly differential will be the actual restore point in case of problems. If I can improve the situation with the 15-minute trans logs, great, but the hourly diff will be the primary go-to in the event of a problem. Compression of course, with off-site storage of the nightly copies, and I will also look at making all of it 'on-demand', i.e., only when the database is seeing some activity, which does not happen every day. (And yes, I WILL test-restore my backups occasionally. 🙂 )

Many thanks to everyone for the input.

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And an extra note, I've been looking at the 'on-demand' bit, so I don't make unnecessary backups of something that hasn't changed. I made this small test script that I will use as a starting point for that functionality - maybe someone else will find it useful:

declare @P datetime, @N datetime, @D int

set @P = (SELECT max(isnull(last_user_update,0))

FROM sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats

WHERE database_id = DB_ID( 'PaleoData'))

print @P

set @N = getdate()

print @N

set @D = datediff(n,@P,@N)

if @D < 15 print 'Less than 15, do trans'

if @D < 60 print 'Less than 1 hour, do diff'

if @D < 1440 print 'Less than a day, do full'