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SQL Restore In Full Recovery Mode - Why Does Backup Exec Insist on Using Tapes?

Frank_Lesniak
Level 3
Hello,

I have a customer who has the following backup procedure for their SQL server. All SQL databases (besides the built-in system databases) are in the full recovery mode.

Full database backup occurs on Friday evening. This backup job is written to disk. A "duplicate backup set" job exists in Backup Exec to duplicate the job to tape.
A log database backup occurs on Friday every two hours after the full database backup occurred. This backup job is written to disk. A "duplicate backup set" job exists in Backup Exec to duplicate the job to tape.
A log database backup occurs on Saturday - Thursday every two hours. This backup job is written to disk only.

To restore the database, my client is finding that the full database backup is listed twice (chronologically, first the disk backup and then the tape backup). Friday's log database backups (which were duplicated to tape as well) are also listed twice for each run (chronologically, first the disk backup and then the tape backup). Saturday - Thursday log backups are only listed once.

All of this makes sense, but my client is finding that in order to do a restore, he must select the most recent full backup (i.e. the duplicate backup set job to tape and *not* the backup set on disk). Additionally, he must select each log backup (i.e. *both* the backup set on disk and the duplicated backup set job to tape) in order for Backup Exec to see the selections as valid.

This seems like a bug to me. I don't think there's any reason that my customer should need to pull tapes when the backup data on tape is the exact same as what's on disk. He should be able to simply select the on-disk full backup, and then each on-disk log backup that's occurred since the last full. But that's not the case. What gives?

Thanks!
Frank
1 REPLY 1

Ben_L_
Level 6
Employee
Frank,

I'm going to do some testing here with the SQL agent to see if I can reproduce the issue your client is seeing.  I'll let you know what I find out.