Sql Server 2016 maintenance plan with weekly full backup and 4h differential backups I am new to SQL server management, I'm mostly a developer tasked with managing a SQL Server :-(  

That aside, please bear with me.

Right now I have made a maintenance task to create a Full Backup every day at 2:00 am, and afterwards delete any backup older than 2 days. That however leaves a whole workday worth of data to be lost in case something went wrong at the right (wrong?) time. So to minimize data loss without without making performance take a hit, I', trying to create one weekly Full Backup and then a Differential Backup every 4 hours. I am however puzzled at how to do this from the management studio, or anywhere else for that matter.   

So my question is:

How can I configure this backup 'policy' on my Server?
Sounds like you are using maintenance plans for your Full backup.  If so, make a new plan with a Backup task in it and change the backup type in the GUI to Differential, then set the schedule.   As RDFozz says, consider also using t-log backups every 15-60 minutes throughout the day.   If not, and your databases are in FULL recovery model, you will likely get crazy file growth in your .ldf files :)



Note that the task in this image says full, because that is the default.  When I click OK, it will change.