>>Hi,
>>To backup an SQL database, is it suffcient just to copy out the .MDF and .LDF files.
>>(I tried to restore from these recently but ran into problems )
>
>Needs to be detached before copying out, but that removes it from master database, then needs to be reattached so it can be used.
>
>I used a simpler approach: wrote a script which runs the backup, packed that in a little vfp .exe, and scheduled it to run about 30 minutes before the regular system backup. It wasn't a matter of not trusting the system backup, we simply needed to have the data available elsewhere, and a few hours' delay was OK. Another app downloaded the zipped backup, unzipped it, restored.


For ourselves and our clients we always use either a SQL Server Agent Job, a SQL Server Maintenance Plan backup (along with integrity check, etc), or run a SQL Backup script as a scheduled task.

Once the backup file is created it is automatically renamed to include database name, date, and time, and copied to a remote backup location (workstation/NAS/USB Drive/etc).