Backup is an important component of a sound disaster recovery strategy. Here are some best practices you can follow to ensure you have a good backup in place:

• Make sure you are not storing your backups in the same physical location as the database files. When your physical drive goes bad, you should be able to use the other drive or remote location that stored the backups in order to perform a restore. Keep in mind that you could create several logical volumes or partitions from a same physical disk drive. Carefully study the disk partition and logical column layouts before choosing a storage location for the backups.

• Make sure you have a proper backup schedule established according to the needs of the application and business requirements. As the backups get old, the risk of data loss is higher unless you have a way to regenerate all the data till the point of failure.

• Make sure to actually restore the backups on a test server and verify that you can restore with all the options and conditions you need to use during a planned or un-planned downtime.

• Use the verification options provided by the backup utilities [BACKUP TSQL command, SQL Server Maintenance Plans, your backup software or solution, etc].

• Use advanced features like BACKUP CHECKSUM to detect problems with the backup media itself.