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SQL Server 2008 Maintenance Plan Questions

Hello,

We've setup a maintenance plan on a SQL Server 2008 to backup all our databases. Does this also backup all SQL Server settings, user accounts, maintenance jobs, and permissions? If not, how can we go about backing these up?

Thanks!

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Aneesh

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No. A database backup backs up data, table structures, functions, stored procs, views, database users, triggers and basically everything that you can see in SSMS under the specific database node on the left. Permissions of the database users are backed up, but SQL Server logins tied to those users are not. If you restore your backup to a different server, you will need to manually create the logins, and then drop and re-create the database users to re-associate them.
Server settings you are better off just writing down and manually configuring them from a checklist in a new installation. Or create an unattended installation package if necessary, with specific configurations.
Maintenance jobs, permissions, user and login creation, SQL Agent jobs, and other objects that are outside the scope of a specific database - you are better off generating and saving scripts for these (can be done usually on right-click of a node in SSMS), and applying them to the newly restored database.
As an alternative, you can purchase third-party tools that will make this task easier (Idera and Embarcadero come to mind), but these tools are as a rule pretty expensive, and they don't really do anything you couldn't do yourself through scripts.
If you really want to automate all of this scripting - look into the system tables and views, you can usually retrieve the DDL from there for almost all your objects, even encrypted ones (with a bit of web searching for decryption code).