Comments on: Database maintenance task (full back up) fails on SQL Server

By: proud2bbrown

proud2bbrown — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:55:59 +0000

Hi Mrdenny, I have the same problem as GIG’s. I have a database full backup maintenance plan that fails and shos the same error as GIG’s. I checked disk space and I have 471GB available. My database is just about 18GB in size. What could be causing the maintenance plan to fail?

Please help. Thanks in advance.

By: gig

gig — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:47:20 +0000

Thanks for your inputs..MrDenny.

By: mrdenny

mrdenny — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:14:20 +0000

If you don’t need to keep the transaction log the change the log to simple recovery.

If you do need the log, backup the transaction log on a regular basis (every 15-30 minutes is normal) and the log will stay empty. After the first log backup you can then shrink the file smaller.

If you keep the database in full recovery and don’t backup the log then there is no point in keeping the database in full recovery mode as you can’t do a point in time restore without log backups.

By: gig

gig — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:05:58 +0000

Thanks for your replu MRdenny.

So can you suggest me a solution as my log file are contantly increasing and occupying a lot of disk space. so i have started truncating the log file. The whole size of the db is now 380 GB.
The file growth is 100 MB. Full backup taken every day.

On the database properties, i could see availiable space is 90 GB.
Is there a possible way to reduce this space.

I used shrinking, but did not help me.
can you please let me know how to manage all this stuff.
sql 2005 sp2.

By: mrdenny

mrdenny — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:00:21 +0000

If you do the full backup after you switch the database back to full recovery then you will be able to restore the database and roll any future log backups to it. You will not be able to restore from the log backups before this operation through to the log backups taken after this operation as the log chain will have been broken.

If you need to clear the transaction log simply to a

BACKUP LOG YourDatabase WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY

.
This will clear the log of all it’s entries. As soon as you run this command you will need to perform a full backup, and just like changing the recovery mode you will not be able to restore from the logs before this statement is run to the logs after this statement is run because the log chain will still be broken.

By: gig

gig — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:17:42 +0000

Thanks for your reply, i checked the error logs. there is no enough space on the drive, i have created the space and the backup is sucessful.
I just want to know if the database is affected if we change the recovery from full to simple and then back to full, truncating the log file.

does the backup created can be restored sucessfully if we do this changes on the recovery.?

thanks..

By: mrdenny

mrdenny — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 23:19:00 +0000

Check your ERRORLOG file. It will provide more information about why the backups are failing in there. Can you post all the data from the ERRORLOG related to the backup failure? If needed just zip up the file and upload it somewhere and post a link to the file, and I’ll find the correct lines in it.