Re: Backup failed

On Saturday, January 24, 2004 5:56 PM [GMT+0100=CET],
Mike Dimmick <[email protected]> wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [email protected]
>> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Jeroen
>> Schmitz
>> Sent: 24 January 2004 15:39
>> To: [email protected]
>> Subject: [vault-list] Backup failed
>>
>> since today I'm having trouble creating a backup of our sourcegear
>> database. Using the admin tool I try to create a backup, but after a
>> (long) while I get an error message that the backup failed. I looked
>> into the sql server errorlog and found this:
>>
>> 2004-01-24 16:23:05.58 backup    BACKUP failed to complete the
>> command dbo.spcreatebackup;1
>
> Out of disk space on the backup disk? No access to the backup
> directory?
>
> Vault simply relies on SQL Server's BACKUP command to perform
> backups. When you specify a file name for the backup in the Admin
> tool, it writes the backup to the default backup directory on the
> server. The default location for this is C:\Program Files\Microsoft
> SQL Server\MSSQL\BACKUP, unless you've changed it (or your
> %PROGRAMFILES% folder lives somewhere else). This can be changed in
> the registry on the server: look in
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer.
>
> I believe that SQL Server uses its service account to write the
> backups; you should ensure that the service account has the right to
> write files in this directory.

Well, this all can't be the cause of this failure I think. I have
created several backups on this server in the past succesfully and
nothing has changed on the server. There's also plenty of diskspace left
(several gigabytes, while our database is about 300 megabytes). It's not
that the backup procedure doesn't start at all, it does and I can see
that the sgvbak file with the name I specified is created in the
directory to where I create the backups (which I did indeed change to
something else than the default). But after a while it aborts and the
created file is removed again.
Could it be that the backup takes too long to create on our server
(which is I must admit a very slow machine, it will be upgraded to
something more modern in the very near future) and that some kind of
timeout occurs which causes sql server to think the backup failed?

> I thought there was an option in Enterprise Manager to change this,
> but I can't find it at the moment.
>
> If you have SQL Server rather than MSDE, consider using SQL Server
> Agent to set up a database maintenance plan.

I'm still running on MSDE so I don't have the Enterprise Manager,
unfortunately.

Regards,
Jeroen