At the high-level, there are 3 most important backups...

Full Backup – these backups contain ALL the data in a specific database.

Differential backup - A differential backup contains only the data that has changed since the differential base. At restore time, the full backup is restored first, followed by the most recent differential backup.

Transactional Log Backups - The transaction log is a serial record of all the transactions that have been performed against the database since the transaction log was last backed up. With transaction log backups, you can recover the database to a specific point in time or the point of failure in the FULL recovery model.

There are other special types of backups that we didn't cover include...

• 1 - Partial Backup
• 2 - File Backup
• 3 - Differential Partial Backup
• 4 - Differential File Backup
• 5 - Copy-Only Backups