One of the most important things that you can do as a DBA, or really as any sort of system administrator, is back up your system.Ensuring that you have have backups, and of course, that you can restore them, is the number one priority for sysadmins. Everything else that you need to do is second to backups. After all, backups ensure you still have a system after a disaster. If you can't do that, then security, performance, features, none of that matters.
I have worked in large and small environments, and in all cases, I've assumed that as the DBA, I need to be checking that backups are occurring, and that I can restore them in case of any issues. Often this has meant I need to work more closely with others that have the actual responsibility for performing backups. This week, I'm wondering how many of you work in similar situations.
 
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