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Backing Up the Service Master Key

William Assaf takes us through backing up important keys in SQL Server:

You should consider complimentary backup solutions that backup/snapshot the entire server (or VM) for SQL Server, but sometimes these technologies are limited or have too much of an impact on the server. A whole VM snapshot for example that is reliant on VSS could incur an unacceptable long IO stun duration when it occurs. 

Regardless, in all cases, SQL Server backups of each database should be taken regularly. This is a conversation for another blog post but a typical pattern is weekly full backups, nightly differential backups, and in the case of databases not in SIMPLE recovery model, 15 minute transaction log backups.

Read the whole thing.