My goal:
Have a history going back a week that stores all changes every x amount of minutes (I'm thinking 30-60).

Reason:
We back up the SQL database to tape nightly; however, if anything is ever deleted or missing I want to know it was saved more recently than to tape to restore from that.

I'm pretty sure there is a built in way to do this - but I am a noob. Can anyone point me in the correct direction?

Thanks,

you will want to do a "differential" backup.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181092.aspx

No, i think he is referring to a history system.
For each table that you want to track in this way, you will need a 'shadow' or 'history' table next to it to record the changes in.
Say that a table you want to track is


Then you historytable could be something like


Optionaly you can also add for example a UserID or something to track who was the one that did it.
Note that the primary key from the original table is no longer a primary key. It will even contain duplicates.
To access the reccords in a good fashion a new pk is added that should (also) be a sequence.

Now on the original Users table you will need to make some triggers.
On every insert, update or delete you should insert a reccord into the history table containing the NEW values. (not the old ones, those should already be there from the insert!)
With the delete trigger ofcourse NULLs should be inserted as new values.


I hope this helps.