Steve Jones notes one interesting change to backups in SQL Server 2025:
I’ve been a DBA (or Ops manager) for quite a bit of my career, and one of the things I’ve thought was top priority was backups. I always want to be sure I have a recovery strategy, because if I don’t, nothing matters. Things go wrong and systems fail and I need to protect systems.
Security is a close second, but backups really matter.
Something else backup-related that Steve doesn’t mention is the new form of backup compression using ZSTD. Initial testing of this has been fairly positive and I think it’s worth trying it out as well.