How often do you back up your databases? If the answer is anything other than daily, you may be asking for trouble. You update your data daily, and as such, a daily back-up should be done as part of your disaster recovery plan. This will ensure that should your servers go down, at worst you have lost one day worth of data.
The Dynamics SL application and system databases can be backed up by setting up a maintenance plan in SQL Server. Built in features of SQL Server allow you to save backups for a number of days specified in the maintenance plan. It is a good idea to save 10 days worth of back-ups. You can then set the maintenance plan to delete the back-up after 10 days.
A good SQL Server maintenance plan will allow you to have data available when you need it – but you still need to ensure that your back-ups are stored securely. It is also important to make sure the back-ups do not reside on the same drive or server as your database, as a single failure can wipe out both your data and your back-up. It is important that you set up a plan to store your data off site so that redundant backups are located in different physical locations. This will guard against catastrophic loss due to accident or other interruptions.
Once you have established a back up procedure, it is very important that you test your procedures. Most clients rarely, if ever, have to perform a restore. For this reason, you should test your restores from back-up quarterly to ensure everything is running smoothly. This is especially true if your back-ups are stored on tape.
By Intellitec Solutions,
