Creating a SQL Database backup of Snow Inventory and Snow License Manager to send to Snow Support

The Support team may request a copy of your Snow License Manager or Snow Inventory SQL database for investigation purposes.  There are multiple backup software options available in the market to backup SQL Databases.  However the Snow Support team require that when sending the database copy to them that the backup is taken through Microsoft SQL Server - SQL Management Studio.  This article outlines the steps to take a full, one-off backup for the purposes of sending it to the Support team.

1. Login to the database server where the Snow Inventory and Snow License Manager databases are hosted.  In our example we will start by backing up the Snow Inventory database.

2. Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio:

3. Provide the SQL Server credentials, then click Connect

4. Ensure that you have enough disk space on the specific drive or location you will store the backups of your Snow Inventory and Snow License Manager Databases. Once you have check this, you may now proceed to the next step.

5. Drill down to the Snow Inventory Database > Right-click > Tasks > Back Up.

6. By default it will have one or more entry. Take a screenshot of this to note the location. If in the specified drive you have enough disk space, you can proceed without following below instructions and just hit the OK button to start the backup process. Once it is complete, go to the folder where the backup was saved and zip / compress it before sending to Snow Support.

NOTE: Do not perform the backup if the Snow Data Update Job is also running.

7.  If you do need to define a new drive to store the backup to ensure there is enough disk space please proceed to step 8

8. As an example, if you want to save the backups to your Drive F, create a folder on your Drive F (such as Snow DB Backups):

9. If you see two entries, make a note / screengrab of those because we will remove them to put them back later on:

10.  In this example, a folder named Snow DB Backups was created to host the Databases backup.  Name the file (example shown below):

11. Click OK to start the backup:

12.  Zip / compress the backup file before sending to Support.

13.  Follow the same steps if you need to also backup the Snow License Manager Database:

14.  Name the backup to show it is for Snow License Manager Database and ideally also add the timestamp as shown below:

IMPORTANT: For both Database backups (SnowInventory and SnowLicenseManager) Revert the old drive and directory where the backup was previously set before running these steps so that backups continue as previously.