Does anyone know of a nice tool that can be scheduled to backup databases & logs and truncate logs?
Is use SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
Does anyone know of a nice tool that can be scheduled to backup databases & logs and truncate logs?
Is use SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
Is there a reason that you want a special tool for this instead of setting up scheduled maintenance jobs in SQL Server Agent? What are your requirements?
I recommend the scripts from Ola Hallengren that is free to use as a way to set up basic backup solution. It sets up the SQL Agent jobs, the only thing you have to do is enable and schedule when and what of the backup jobs you want to run. It writes the backups to your default backup directory, so be sure to change the parameter in the jobs if this is not your intended destination.
Really simple & free approach is Windows Scheduler running your own scripts using the sqlcmd tool that comes with SQL Server.
Not sure why so many people avoid rolling their own backup scripts and scheduling them when they're using editions that don't have a SQL Agent installed.
Good examples of sqlcmd here.
Use a tool like Symantec BackupExec to compress the backups to a central location, another option is Red Gate's SQL Backup tool that does compression. The other option is as others have said is to do a backup directly in SQL, but unless you have enterprise, it won't compress the data.
We use a combination of SQL Server Agent + Windows Task Scheduler to backup, zip databases and copying them to an external disk.
There is obviously the native SQL Server tool, Redgate has a good backup and there are others out there. I guess it really depends on the problem you are trying to solve.