Sql-server – Can a SQL Server 2000 database be hosted on SQL Server 2005/2008

There's really no reason NOT to use SQL Server's native backup functionality. It's great, understands transaction logs, and gives you most of the functionality you need. (Third party SQL Server Backup solutions are great because they work with the APIs that Microsoft has exposed, and usually provide encryption and compression support - and compression not only saves disk space, but typically reduces backup and restore times.)

So yeah... I'd recommend doing backups WITH SQL Server.

And make sure to do REGULAR transaction log backups. (I'd recommend doing them every 15 minutes or less - regular log file backups help keep your log file lean/mean 1 and for some reason end-users are always grumpy when the server crashes and they have to redo all of their work over the last x hours since the last logfile or full/differential backup.) Then, for redundancy purposes, use robocopy, syncback, file system replication or something to move copies of those backups to another location to protect against hardware/disk crashes or fires in the data center and so on.

Feel free to check out these two free videos for more info and ideas:

http://www.sqlservervideos.com/video/backup-options

http://www.sqlservervideos.com/video/sqlbackup-best-practices/

[1] [SQL Server Magazine: Maximing Storage Performance]3

Question in reply - why do you want 2005 as a fall-back position? Once you've tested your business-cycle on 2008 and are satisfied, shouldn't be any reason to move back.

You could try down-level transactional replication, but that's going to get very nasty very quickly for an entire database.

My advice - test, upgrade, don't look back.