Brad’s Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans- P34: SQL Server has a reputation as being a simple database application to install, configure, and maintain. This is a little misleading. SQL Server is a powerful relational database that can handle the needs of the largest organizations and, as such, its proper maintenance almost certainly requires the attention of an experienced DBA. | Chapter 13 Back Up Database Differential Task On the other hand if we want to perform differential backups on only some of our databases then we will have to create multiple Maintenance Plans adding some complexity to our database maintenance. This is because as we have already learned the Wizard does not allow us to include multiple instances of the same task within the same Maintenance Plan. At a minimum we will have to create one Maintenance Plan for those databases that don t require differential backups and one Maintenance Plan for those databases that do. Alternatively we can use the Maintenance Plan Designer which does allow multiple instances of the same task as described in Chapter 16 onwards. Other parts of the Define Back Up Database Differential Task screen are configured in exactly the same way as the Define Back Up Database Full Task screen so I won t discuss them again here. Creating the Job Schedule If you choose to perform differential backups from within a Maintenance Plan created by the Wizard you will have to carefully think through your backup schedule and how you want to do it. For example you will have to create a task to perform a full backup once a week see the previous chapter on how to do this a separate task to perform daily differential backups and another task to perform transaction log backups more on this in the next chapter . What can become a little confusing is how to schedule these three tasks so they don t interfere with each other. For example let s assume that we want to perform a full backup on Sunday differential backups on Monday through Saturday and that we want to take transaction logs once each hour. To do this we would need to schedule these three tasks so that the full backup always occurs first on Sunday night once a full backup is made transaction log backups are made once an hour until Monday night when the first differential backup is made. Once the Monday night differential backup is made then we need to have .
