Why Back Up?

Today's hardware and software components are many times more reliable than those of the not-so-distant past; however, there is always the threat of some type of failure. It is therefore in your best interest to have a safety net in place at all times to quickly resume production following a failure, with minimal or no loss of data. When people think of situations that could result in the loss of data, they typically think of hard disk crashes. There are, however, other situations that can have the same end result, but are not frequently considered when planning for recovery. These include:

Hard disk subsystem failure.
Systems software failure.
Accidental or malicious use of deletion statements—for example:
DELETE * FROM prod_table DROP DATABASE customers
format c:
Accidental or malicious use of update statements—for example, expecting to update one row in a table but not qualifying the WHERE clause.
Destructive viruses.
Natural disasters.
Theft.

Microsoft SQL Server provides many fast and reliable ways to back up your data. To ensure that your data is safeguarded, you need to define a reliable backup strategy.