Wayne West (1/13/2009)
I both like and don't like the concept of the backup file containing the date of backup, right now I don't code the date into the file name on our systems, and I don't use maintenance plans for backups. It's nice in that you can look at the file and see the database name and backup date, but the file has a timestamp that also shows the date, so the information almost seems redundant since the file timestamp is not altered when the file is restored. Plus, the thought of digging in to the system tables (though I love working with system tables!) to find file names to delete just really bugs me for some reason. I prefer to have my system just overwrite the backup and not worry about it. On occasion a backup will fail and something will have squirreled-up the backup file, in which case I delete it and do a backup with overwrite and that seems to take care of it.
Hi Wayne,
I am clearly not as salted with SQL Server as what you are but I use maintenance plans to do my backups and it uses the dbname_yyyymmdd_sequencenumber as file name and I also have a maintenance plan to cleanup old backups so I have little to do in the way of backups. I come in every morning and do some checks on the database to make sure backups is ok etc. Now I suppose you will laugh at me but I have one user database that is about 2 GB in size. I dunno what I'll do with a 700 gb database.
I have never before heard even of multiple backups in one file so al my backups, user db, test db, system db's and other goes into different folders.
:-PManie Verster
Developer
Johannesburg
South Africa
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. - Holy Bible
I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times. - Everett Mckinley Dirkson (Well, I am trying. - Manie Verster)