Basically I was learning the Ms stack of software and working on an application that used an *.mdf file mounted to the local ./SQLEXPRESS instance.
I then upgraded all software on the machine to Windows 8 RTM, Visual Studio 2012 Pro etc. And installed SQL Server Express 2012 with the latest version of basic Management Studio. When I first started VS2012 it asked me to convert the MDF file to the latest version and I did. For what its worth I also have a copy of one that has not been upgraded/converted.
Now I want to deploy and test out this application on shared hosting and load my database on their SQL server, this hosting service uses SQL Server 2008 R2. When I try to import a *.bak file created by the latest above mentioned Ms tools on to this server it gives me an error as follows: The media family on device is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family. (severity 16)
I have read around and it appears it's strictly to do with version incompatibility, where older version of SQL server will not work with *.bak files and others created by the new gen of tools.
First thing I did was download and load SQL Server Management Studio 2008 onto my Windows 8 machine, to my disappointment it was a no go and it just gave me errors when I tried to do a backup and overall felt like it had compatibility issues. Maybe because I connected to the new local (LocalDB)\v11.0 server instead of the old ./SQLEXPRESS which I don't have installed anymore.
In general should I expect SQL Server 2008 Express and Management tools to work on Windows 8 ? Otherwise what are my options (besides loading the old software stack in a VM etc.), maybe there's backwards compatibility mode when creating backups ? Or some other software that will run in Windows 8 and do a *.bak dump using the older mdf file version ?