Let’s talk about data security: How to back-up your TMS database

This is a step-by-step guide on how to backup your database if you are using a product of The Museum System (TMS) by Gallery Systems. If you use a different system it will work differently. Ask your vendor about it.

Step 1: Log into your database server and open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio

You usually find it fastest if you start typing “SQL Server Management…” into the Windows search box.

Step 2: Enter your credentials

You will be prompted to enter your login credentials. If you are on NT Authentication usually all you have to do is click on “Connect”. If you have another form of authentication you will have to enter those login details. Your IT will tell you what to enter in that case.

Step 3: Find your database

In the tree hierarchy, open the folder “Databases” and find your database. It is usually called something like “TMS”. In my case it is called “Leer”.

Step 4: Navigate to the backup menu

Right click on your database, choose “Tasks” and then “Back Up…”

If that option is greyed out, you might not have the rights to do this. in which case you should talk to your IT so you get those rights.

Step 5: Chose your backup method

You will get to this screen:

Here you can choose if you want to do a full or differential backup (we talked about that here). You select that in the drop-down “Backup type”. We chose “Full” for this backup.

As a destination, usually “Disk” is fine, since you probably want to have the backup on your computer first and then transfer it to a cloud later.

Sometimes you will see a backup file already in the screen below that. If that’s the case, remove it, first.

Then click on “Add…”

Step 6: Add the file you want to back up to

By default, Microsoft suggest a rather cryptic sub-folder for your backups. I’d recommend adding a folder in a more prominent place that you can easily find and back up to there. You can see mine being “M:\Backups”.

Enter a file name for your backup. This can be the date you took it (Best Practice is to note the date in a year-month-day format so you can easily sort by date if you have multiple backup files) or a significant pointer to when you took it, for example “BeforeUpgradeTo995” if this is your backup before upgrading to a new version. Don’t forget to add “.bak” as a file ending, otherwise you might run into difficulties to restore it, later.

You can see that I called mine “AfterCI2025.bak” because it is the backup I took after adding a significant amount of information from our user conference.

Once you entered the name, hit “OK”.

Step 7: Take your backup

After that you just need to click on “OK” and your backup will be taken. If you have enough disc space in your chosen location, all is fine, otherwise it will throw an error message.

That was it. Wasn’t too hard, was it? And now you are good to go and bring your database to a safe location. I will do another post on how to compress the backup and restore it on another server.

Take your backup and take care!

Angela