Incremental job will not run...

[GregNY]

Hello. We have multiple SQL servers and in order to backup the transaction logs we need to run incremental jobs.

The problem we are having is our Incremental job(s) will not run if the Full job runs past (even a little bit) the Incr start time.

In other words if we have a Full job that runs starts at 900pm and the Incremental starts at 930pm and the Full runs from 900pm to 931pm the Incremental job will not run at all. It will act as if there is no Incremental job.

This is a problem because of this we have to space our backup jobs apart and a lot of time is wasted. Sometimes a Full will run a little longer one night and we will be stuck with incomplete backup for the night.

The server and the agent(s) are all fully up to date (SP2)

We have tried re-creating the backup jobs.

There are no errors in the log pertaining as to why the Incremental job did not run.

The older version that we used to run never had this problem. If a backup job ran a little past the next jobs start time the next job would start as soon as the current job ended.

This is very frustrating for we we have many backup jobs and they take all night. We can not afford to waste any time.

What is the fix for this?

Thanks

[Donald_Eady]

Are you writting to disk or tape? are you seeing any calls for media ? any alerts? 

In either event the incremental job should just que up and kick off once the full is complete provided the jobs are not scheduled to start at the same time. 

[GregNY]

Sorry I should have included that we are backing up to tape.

I have also tried running these jobs to disk as a test and I have the same problem there.

In an older version we backed up to tape and had no issues like this.

There are no errors that I can see especially pertaining to tape backup.

[pkh]

Try this: Put the log backups on hold and then use a post-command in the database backup job to start the log backups.  See my article below on how to start a job using BEMCLI

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/use-bemcli-chain-jobs

[GregNY]

Thanks pkh for the suggestion. We may consider it.

Its just getting really rediculous considering all the hoops we have to jump through to get BE2012 working.

Symantec did a huge mistake IMO going in this direction. They had a product that worked quite well and redesigned causing big issues. Probably in the end which is getting near we may look for another backup solution other than Symantec. The 2012 version has really frustrated us.

For now I am hoping that Symantec can redeem themselves so I am open for more viable solutions than running commands.

Thanks