BE 15 and SharePoint with custom DBs

[yzhdan]

Hello, 

we have a Sharepoint 2010 installation in the production. Virtual machine running W2008r2 (web application) and SQL server 2013 running on a baremetal server. BE Agents are both installed on the IIS and SQL servers. Our developers are using several custom databases on SQL side in order to implement some business logic. 

In BE 15 we setup a backup job using Server Farm, which was running fine. But later we discovered that the custom databases I mentioned before were not being selected and were not backed up. I think this is because SP backup agent doesn't recognize those DBs as Sharepoint's DBs.

The question are: how to make SP agent think that all DB on the SQL server instance are SharePoint DBs (except standard MSSQL DB -- data, model etc.)?

Is there any workaround for my case? We found it very inconvenient to backup up custom DB using different job.

[AndrewHarris]

From what it looks like, only databases registered with Microsoft IBackupRestore in SharePoint are the ones that would be visible through the SharePoint agent. Any others created outside of SharePoint would have to be protected through the SQL Agent.

[pkh]

Note that although you can backup these databases with the SQL agent, it would be very difficult to ensure that the backups are logically consistent with the rest of the Sharepoint databases.

Shutting down the applications which uses this Sharepoint farm before starting your backups would be a good way to ensure that all your backups are logically consistent.