Saving scripts and system tables

For further protection, save the scripts containing all of your disk init, create database, and alter database commands and make a hard copy of your sysdatabases, sysusages, and sysdevices tables each time you issue one of these commands.

You cannot use the dataserver command to automatically recover changes that result from these commands. If you keep your scripts—files containing Transact-SQL statements—you can run them to re-create the changes. Otherwise, you must reissue each command against the rebuilt master database.

You should also keep a hard copy of syslogins. When you recover master from a dump, compare the hard copy to your current version of the table to be sure that users retain the same user IDs.

For information on the exact queries to run against the system tables, see “Backing up master and keeping copies of system tables” on page 27.