Does Backup Exec Dump SQL Server Backups to disk first?
Over the weekend I was surprised to discover that Backup Exec was dumping our SQL Server databases. What led me to this discovery was that we were out of space on the C drive on the production server. This is bad.
It looks as if BE dumps to disk first and then moves those dumps to tape. Is this the case? Since I already had another script doing database backups (but not to the C drive !!!), it's now not 100% clear what is doing what and why. I'm not sure how BE works but I do not see any backup devices defined in SQL Server so I have concluded that it must dump to disk first. But then I cannot see where I could change that behavior, maybe to dump to another drive.
We only use an actual DUMP process for our own SQL express instance as part of maintenance of the BEDB
The backup process uses VSS (and I guess an API call into the SQL backup process)
It is possible if you can recnfigure the operating system or filesystem so that VSS requests get stored on a different volume that this might solve your issue
However that said, mainly for performance reasons, Microsoft do not recommend running SQL databases on the C: drive anyway so if this is what you have done you might want to relocate your SQL databases to a different volume
