Backup of Transaction Log not working Correctly

[Dunks]

Hi

I'm trying to backup my Enterprise Vault 8.0 transaction Logs using Backup Exec 12.5. We have the Backup exec Agent for Enterprise Vault installed and working.

The databases are set to Full Recovery Model and if I do a full backup of any them, either using the Agent, or otherwise for those that aren't visible through the agent view - ie  the Discovery Database - the backups are successful.

However, if I then do a Full backup of any of the transaction logs, whilst backup Exec says the backups are successful, this looks to be incorrect as the size of the backup job is always 4752 bytes, whilst the actual size of the logs range from 13-50 GB. If I go into SQL Server Management Studio on the Enterprise Vault Server and look at the properties of the database, it says the logs haven't been backed up, whilst the databases have.

On the backup exec job the Backup Method of "log- Backup transaction Log" is selected.

I'm a bit stumped as to why they aren't working.

Any ideas or suggestions to try and resolve this issue? Thanks

[Hemant_Jain]

The method for log backup that you are selecting applies to SQL Agent and not to EV Agent. For EV database transaction logs to be truncated, you need to select backup type as incremental in "Enterprise Vault" tab in the backup job properties and not the SQL Agent tab. Incremental backup of EV databases would do Log backup for SQL databases and truncate logs.

Please mark it a solution, if this is useful.
Thanks

[Dunks]

Hi Hemant. many thanks for your response.

Following your instructions I firstly ran a backup of the Discovery Database, which was successful.

I then changed the job setup In Backup Exec 12.5 so that the Enterprise Vault  Backup Method is Incremental.

I then re-ran the backup of that log file. However the results were the same in that the Byte count is still 4752 Bytes for a log file that is 1, 974, 912 KB.

So it appears that the backup is still not running successfully. Are there any other options I need to select to backup the transaction log successfully?

thanks

[JT_T]

Hi Dunks,

I might be wrong here, but is it so that your log file growth to size almost 2GB? And you have completed incremental log file backups, but the log file size on disk remains same?

Might be so that your log backups were successful, but backup just doesn't automatically remove empty space from log file, and data size might be something very different than the actual file size on disk.

So, you need to shrink your log file or create a new one. You can do that from SQL Management studio with graphical UI, or running sql commands.

But first of all, you should check what's the actual data size on your log file, and after that decide what to do, is everything as it should be. If actual data size is same or almost same as your backups shows, then there's nothing to worry about it, if you have enough disk space.

From SQL Management Studio, run following command to your EV database;

USE "name of your EV database" (without ") example USE EV_Database
GO
sp_helpfile
GO

That should show your EV database and log file size, the actual size, and you can compare log file's data size to your backup size.

WARNING!
I've only used mentioned SQL log/database maintenances for other databases like Sharepoint and so on, not sure can you shrink/drop EV database's log files. Symantec support knows that, consider asking help from them.

[Dunks]

Hi JT_T

Thanks for your response

What we're wanting to do in the end is to be able to shrink the log file, as you suggested.

However in order to do this we need to be able to do a successful backup of the log file first to back it up and truncate it.

The issue is that whist the backups of the log files say they are successful, i don't believe that they are, as the size of any of the backups that I do is always 4752 Bytes. As mentioned above the logs all vary in size.

I ran the Transact SQL command you supplied and even after backup the size of the log is showing as 1,974,912 KB rather than the 4,752 KB on the backup.

I've contacted Symantec directly, so we'll see what they say.

thanks for taking time out to respond JT_T

[Hemant_Jain]

When you did the log backup method of EV Agent, you must see in the job log that logs were backed up. Once that is done, you would not see an immediate shrink in the file size. You will need to run shrinkfile command to get it shrinked. As far as size of the backup is concerned, SQL will give us the actual data in the file and not the complete file. So, SQL considers that there is only 4752 kb worth of data in the log file, although the size of log file is high, because it has never been shrunk. You need to configure regular maintenance of files where you shrink them, as just log backup is not enough for shrinking the file. That said, in order to confirm that Backup Exec did perform a log backup, you may check backupset table in your msdb database for information on what type of backup was done by which software. Backup Exec would leave its mark when backup is done, so you must have that information.

Thanks