So far, no one has found exercise to be beneficial to servers. Purposeless repetitive motion may be good for human muscles, but your SQL Server instance experiences no gain for the pain.

Here’s a good example: taking useless backups.

(“Did she say useless backups? I’ve never heard of such a thing!” Yeah, just wait.)

Backup file names are critical

Traditionally, backup files are named after the database and the backup type, and given a timestamp. So you’ll see something like master_FULL_20170101.bak. If you like to stripe your backups, you might name the files something like 1of5MasterFull20170101.bak, and so on.

But I have run across shops that takes backups without bothering to time stamp the file name: master_FULL.bak.  These shops either overwrite each backup file, with each successive backup (using INIT and FORMAT), or add to the backup set (which I find mildly annoying, but to each their own).

The problem with using the same backup file name over and over is if you have a cleanup mechanism that deletes old backup files!

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