Hey,
My company has just got AX 09, we are running this off a SQL server and are planning to get some sort of mirroring server in place. However in the mean time we are having to turn the system off while we do a backup.
Does anyone know a way to do an online backup where we wouldn’t have to turn the system off??
Thanks Andy 
There is no reason to stop SQL Server before making a backup. Many AX production systems actually runs 24 hours/day.
Maybe I should ask: how do you do backups?
We are a 24 hour manufacturing operation, we have been advised by are AX partner that we are unable to preform backups without stopping the AX database, for the past 20 years are old ERP system we have be able to preform online backups though out the day so as to minimise data lose in a disaster, any advise or help would be much appreciated. Are current backup is a manual SQL backup which is preformed after 12 hours of system use please could you help to improve this.
Thanks
I’m not a DB administrator, so don’t ask me any tricky questions [:)], but I should be able to give you some direction.
SQL Server wouldn’t get much much popularity if it had to be stopped for every backup. It actually supports a lot of advanced scenarios and it will take you some time just to read through all of them.
In addition to avoid restarts, you should also decrease time between backups. Currently you may lose data for up to twelve hours, which is much more than most companies find acceptable. Not only you don’t have to stop your database server, but you also typically don’t want to make full backups too often, because it takes time and consume resources. You have other types of backup available, complementing full backups, such as differential and transaction log backups. In that way, you can run some type of backup every ten minutes, for example, which would drastically reduce the amount of data at risk. It should be also obvious that manual backups is not the way to go in any reasonable backup plan.
It’s important to understand that there are very different types of Recovery Models in SQL Server and you want to use the Full Recovery Model in your production environment. It may look a bit complex but the problem is not simple either. You’ll have to plan and manage your backups carefully, because you will need both the full and differential backups to restore your DB to the latest point.
Definitely spend some time with the documentation: Backing Up and Restoring Databases in SQL Server. You’ll find much more information there than can (or should) be discussed here.
There is also nothing special about AX that would require stopping the system for every backup - that would be unacceptable for such a business-critical system.