Backup Database Failure

[Naith]

Hi,

I'm trying to do a one off backup my db, thusly:

USE Reseller2
GO
BACKUP DATABASE Reseller2
   TO DISK = 'E:\Reseller2'
   WITH FORMAT,
   NAME = 'ResellerBackup20060721'
GO

where E:\ is an external drive. (The space on C:\ is limited, and there is no partition.)

The backup fails with the following:

Server: Msg 3202, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Write on 'E:\Reseller2' failed, status = 112. See the SQL Server error log for more details.
Server: Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
BACKUP DATABASE is terminating abnormally.

The error log just states:

- BackupMedium::ReportIoError: write failure on backup device 'E:\Reseller2'. Operating system error 112(error not found).
- BACKUP failed to complete the command BACKUP DATABASE Reseller2
combined with an Internal I/O request, that I can't make head nor tail of.

Can anyone give me some pointers on successful backup completion here?

 

[jbenson001]

Try configuring the backup through the enterprise manager interface. This way you will be able to see if the external device (E) is being recognized.

Jim

 

[Naith]

Thanks for your post, Jim.

That's what I have done. The server reacts to the alias name, just doesn't seem to write anything to it.

The failure is after about a couple of minutes, as opposed to the immediate message I would expect if it didn't recognise the E:\ device.

Naith

 

[jbenson001]

Ohh ok I see, I though it was failing right off the bat. Is this a drive on the network, or on the local machine, say an external USB drive? It sees like a networking type of issue.

 

[Naith]

It's the latter. I'm basically backing up the database to a portable external drive.

 

[jbenson001]

So its an external USB hard drive? I would check it on another PC and see if you can copy files to it. Basically run some tests. Maybe the hard drive itself is bad.

Jim

 

[Naith]

Thanks for your feedback again.

Yes, it's a USB hard drive, and I tried that. Seems I can copy files to it just fine from other machines, and also on the server, where I manually copying files to it.

It only seems to fail where I kick off the backup process from Enterprise Manager, or Query Analyzer where I run a backup script.

(I'm based at an Apple site, so I only have one Windows server to test on).