Hi to all..many thanks for your replies.

I am not familiar with the concept of ATTACHING and DETACHING.
it would seem from your replies that data is held elsewhwre, other than tje MDF amd LDF files.
Anybody know where else the data is held (i.e.is it in another file, the registry or where ?
Could I backup the MDF, LDF and A.N.Other file

regards,
Gerard




>>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.