It's disaster recovery season and database backups have been on my mind a lot lately. Few people take advantage of the built-in backup script that ships with Time Matters. This is the script responsible for making backups from within Time Matters. The script name is TM_Backup and is a stored procedure installed into each Time Matters Enterprise Database. The script is written to produce a backup named for the current day of the week.

As you may know, SQL Server has a built-in Agent that will perform various SQL tasks on a specified schedule. I like to use the agent to create a simple Job to call the TM_Backup stored procedure every morning at say, 2:00am. This gives me a Time Matters backup for every day of the week. I also like to back up the Sunday version of these backups once a week and then save a Sunday backup once a month. This gives me daily backups for the current week, weekly backups for the current month and monthly backups for the recent year. Disk space is cheap, better to be penny wise than pound foolish. And don't forget to take these backups offsite from time to time. If you're concerned with security there are plenty of "safe" online solutions.

And last but not least, make sure you have your IT consultant perform intermittent tests of the backups to ensure they will restore properly. 

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