Enterprise Vault Database shows wrong Date for Last Database Backup Time after Cumulative Incremental Backup

[Georg_Kabas]

I want to backup an Enterprise Vault environment with NetBackup 7.6.

We do have an EV-Server and an SQL-Sever, that holds the Databases. Both Server have the NBU-Agent installed. We don't use archive bit, but timestamp (I have checked this in Client Host Properties), because NBU Admin Guide for EV tells to disable archive bit when using cumulative and incremental backups for Enterprise Vault backups.

We do have three schedules in the policy, that backup directory and monitoring db.

• Full - once a week
• Cumulative incremental - daily in the evening.
• Differential incremental - daily in the morning.

When I look in the NBU Admin Guide for EV, cumulative incremental should do a diff database backup and differential incremental should do a transaction log backup.

After full backup the directory and monitoring sql databases show NBU backup time as last database backup time. After differential incremental backup the sql databases show NBU backup time as last transaction log backup time.

But when I do a cumulative incremental, there are no changes in the sql last database backup time (backup finish successfully). Because enterprise vault is configured to report an error after 3 days of last database backup, we got error messages every tuesday.

I analyzed the failure and have found the following:

When I start a full backup, I get a parent job (backup Job1, Parent Job1) from EV-Server, than I get a child Job from this server (snapshot Job2, Parent Job1) and from this job I get two child jobs from sql-server for the databse backup of directory and monitoring database (backup Job3, Backup Job4, Parent Job2).

But when I start a cumulative incremental backup, I get a parent job (backup Job1, Parent Job1) from EV-Server, and from this job get two child jobs from sql-server for the databse backup of directory and monitoring database (backup Job3, Backup Job4, Parent Job1). I think maybe the missing snapshot job could be the failure?

All backups finish successfully.

What could be wrong in my configuration?

Regards, Georg

[Michal_Mikulik1 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I think there is a combination of several factors, which will probably always lead to warnings in your EV db backup monitoring.

- SQL Server does not show date/time of last differential backup, at least not in database Properties. You can test it from SQL side by performing this type of backup. However , SQL server "knows" about this backup-, it is recorded in msdb..backupset system table.

- similarly, EV monitoring is able to monitor only full/transaction log backups of databases

- yes, during cumulative incremental EV backup, snapshot is not created for databases because SQL differential backup does not need it, only full db backup.

So, with this backup strategy, you will probbaly have to extend age threshold for backup monitoring in EV.

Michal

[Georg_Kabas]

Hello Michal,

thank you for your answer.

So I will extent the warning period in EV.

Regards, Georg