During the course of investigating a technical support issue for Snow Software® Commander®, the need may arise to backup your Microsoft SQL database. To do so, you will use Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. If you did not install this when you installed SQL, you can install it from the original source.

Alternatively, you can download Management Studio Express, and use it to run the queries.

Connecting to Your Database

Follow the procedure below to connect to your Snow Software Commander database.

1. Login to a computer where SQL Server Management Studio is installed.
2. Launch SQL Management Studio from the Start menu.
3. Choose Database Engine as the Server type, choose the correct Server Name from the list or browse for the correct server.

Performing the Backup

Now that you are connected, you can proceed with performing the backup. Before you begin the next procedure, make sure that you have access to as much disk space as is required for the backup file.

1. In the Object Explorer pane, expand the SQL Server housing your Snow Software Commander database.
2. Right-click your Commander database and choose Tasks > Backup.

Performing a backup of the Snow Software Commander database as part of regular maintenance will also help to keep the size of the transaction log down to a manageable amount. Depending on your environmental needs, you may wish to also include a shrink, but remember when you do so your are trading the disk footprint for SQL performance speeds, as SQL must create white space to which records are written, and shrinking eliminates this white space.
 

Snow Software cautions against using third-party backup utilities, as testing has shown that some do not correctly trigger a SQL Server checkpoint upon successful completion. You can easily determine if this is an issue with your backup software by observing the size of the log file before and after a backup completes successfully. If the size of the log is not reduced by the backup followed by a shrink operation, you should use the built-in SQL backup engine rather than the third-party utility.