Backing up and Restoring a Database

At any chosen time, the Tools group of settings located on the Management tab of the Database Monitoring and Management snap-in allows you to manually backup or restore a database.

To backup a database:

1. Click Backup Database.
2. Specify a destination file. According to standard naming conventions, you normally will use the “.BAK” extension for the file.

To restore a database:

1. Click Restore Database.
2. Type the name of a full backup (or browse and select a full backup) and, optionally, the name of a transaction log file. If there are more than one transaction log file saved after the full backup, all of them will automatically be restored one after another until the specified transaction log backup is applied.

To prevent overwriting a database unintentionally, the restore operation automatically performs a safety check. The restore operation fails if:

the database being restored already exists on the server and

the name of the database being restored is not the same as the name of the database recorded in the backup set.

*To restore a database from a different backup file:*

You may want to restore a database from a different backup file when you need to populate an empty database with data. Follow these steps to accomplish this:

1. Follow the steps for the restoring a database.
2. Enable the Force restore of existing database checkbox.