SQL Backups via Veeam

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SQL Backups via Veeam

Joe.Spitler

Say Hey Kid

Points: 691
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December 11, 2012 at 12:17 pm

#286081

I have a client that uses Veeam to backup all their VM boxes. Several have SQL Server instances. Most of the SQL instances do not have backup scheduled with the SQL Agent, however, I can see in the SQL logs that regular backups are occurring. The client does not know where the BAK files are getting saved to. I don't see any scheduled tasks via Windows. They tell me that Veeam is doing the backups. I am not sure what to tell them but I don't know how to confirm how these jobs are running. But they run every day without a hitch according to the SQL logs.

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Michael Valentine Jones SSC Guru Points: 64818 More actions · Answer 1

The location of the backup is recorded in column physical_device_name in table msdb.dbo.backupmediafamily.

If the backup is not going directly to a file system, physical_device_name may contain a path to a virtual device name. In that case, it is up to the backup software to track where the backup data is stored.

However, the point of having a backup is to be able to do a restore, so it sounds like they may not know how to do that. If that is the case, they really need to rethink how they are doing backups.

TheRedneckDBA SSChampion Points: 14001 More actions · Answer 2

I ran into that with some of my servers a couple of years ago. If I recall correctly, our hardware team was doing full server-level backups (or maybe just disk-level backups) and Veeam automatically was doing some VSS Integration stuff when it backed up SQL files, so SQL indeed knows that they were backed up.

I don't know much about Veeam so I don't know what they did to fix it, but I was able to ask them to exclude the SQL files from their backups and they accomodated, so I know it's possible.

I suppose you could argue that the Veeam backups are an acceptable way to backup SQL databases if you just need daily full backups. The problem I had was I was doing differential and TX log backups, and I ran into cases where the full Veeam backups messed up my backup chains.

The Redneck DBA

Joe.Spitler Say Hey Kid Points: 691 More actions · Answer 3

The physical device name is a guid. I assume once I figure out what this guid is actually identifying I can get my BAK file?

Joe.Spitler Say Hey Kid Points: 691 More actions · Answer 4

This is the log text: Database backed up. Database: DBXXX123, creation date(time): 2012/03/02(11:04:08), pages dumped: 10580129, first LSN: 26195:58812:1, last LSN: 26195:58814:1, number of dump devices: 1, device information: (FILE=1, TYPE=VIRTUAL_DEVICE: {'{A436ACD1-523F-4C82-BDE0-8D07779F33A4}1'}). This is an informational message only. No user action is required.

Michael Valentine Jones SSC Guru Points: 64818 More actions · Answer 5

Joe.Spitler (12/11/2012)
The physical device name is a guid. I assume once I figure out what this guid is actually identifying I can get my BAK file?

Probably not. It means that the backup data is entirely under the control of the backup software and you will have to use that for any restores.

This is a big reason why I never want other software to do the database backups. I prefer to do normal backups to a directory, and let the backup software backup those files where ever it stores them.