Automate SQL database backups using Maintenance Plans

Automate SQL database backups using Maintenance Plans

     In this article, we are going to learn how we can automate the backup of the SQL database using database maintenance plans. Data is one of the most important assets of any organization, and as a database administrator, it is our prime responsibility to protect it. There are various tools available that can be used to back up the data. These tools use state of the art technology to protect the data, and some of them are very costly. Instead of using these costly tools, some organizations prefer to use SQL native backups. These backups of SQL database can be automated by SQL Server Agent Jobs or Windows’ task scheduler.

The SQL Server provides the predefined maintenance tasks that can be used to perform database maintenance. These tasks are called database maintenance plans. The maintenance plans can be used to perform maintenance on the local and the remote SQL Server instance.

In this article, I am going to show how we can automate the database backups using SQL Server database maintenance plans. This article is based on a use case, and the details are the following:

1. The Full, Differential, and Log backup of all user and system SQL databases must be taken. Schedules are following
   1. Full Backup: Every Sunday at 1 AM
   2. Differential Backup: Every day except Sunday at 2 AM
   3. Log Backup: Every 15 minutes
2. The backup must be encrypted, and once the backup completes, the backup’s integrity must be checked.
3. The backup location must be the following:
   1. Full Backup: \192.168.0.103BackupsFull Backup
   2. Differential Backup: \192.168.0.103BackupsDifferential Backup
   3. Log Backup: \192.168.0.103BackupsLog Backup
4. The backup set must be expired in 10 days

The backup process should be created as follows