Red Gate Software has a couple of tools to help you with copying your local files to a remote location. Offers full error logging, has email notification on failure,...

Another possible reason for a log backup to fail is if you have never made a full backup of the database. As suggested, do check the SQL Server logs...

Run RESTORE FILELISTONLY on the file e.g.

RESTORE FILELISTONLY FROM DISK = ' '

You are backing up to a network share. Does the SQL Server Agent service startup user have rights to write to that network share?

If the statistics did not exist, they can't be updated.

To create the statistics, use the CREATE STATISTICS command. Or you could have SQL Server create it automatically by running...

If space is at a premium, you might want to consider using a third party backup tool that can compress backups and restore from compressed files.

If both queries retrieve the same data, and you ran them in a batch, there is the possibility that the 2nd query was just fetching data from the buffer pool,...

From BOL:

CHECKSUM

Requests that the backup operation verify each page for checksum

and torn page, if enabled and available, and also to generate a checksum for the entire backup.

It isn't...

Have you tried reversing the order of the queries and compare the timings then? Or run each query individually, preceding each with a DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS to clear the buffer...

In SQL Server 2005, you can create backups with the CHECKSUM option. This generates a checksum for the backup streams. Then instead of running a full restore, you...

Yes. Your fastest restore sequence would be as follows:

- restore full backup taken at 12:00 am

- restore differential backup taken at 4:00 am

- restore transaction log taken at 4:30...

Did you have a chance to compare the execution plans for that stored procedure, when it was performing well as well as when it was performing poorly? The...

SQL Server knows...

As mentioned, once the query has been ran, the data that it retrieves is in the buffer cache, hence subsequent queries that retrieve the same data completes much faster, until...

The presence of the search argument "LIKE '%ring%'" does not automatically force a table scan. There are 2 other search arguments, both of which could cause the query optimizer...