Checked our backup log in the central admin to find that 3 of the last 5 days the backup of the wss content db failed. We are using a UNC and we do use a farm admin user, it does creat the backup folder and the content in files is very similar to that of a successful backup. There is 200GB free space on the backup drive and 148GB free on the OS partition. the log and it tells me .. [6/22/2010 8:43:34 PM]: Error: Object WSS_Content_3b17fd86c6bf4bec82b1e78068ccc941 failed in event OnBackup. For more information, see the error log located in the backup directory. SqlException: A nonrecoverable I/O error occurred on file "\\server\sharepointbackup$\spbr008F\0000000D.bak:" 64(The specified network name is no longer available.). BACKUP DATABASE is terminating abnormally. In SQL Server Management Console shows the WSS_Content backed up at 9:01. Using SQL 2005 - 9.00.4035.00 (x64) on Server 2008 r2 The size of the WSS_Content is 57324 MB. Is this simply a timing issue since the backup doesn't seem to complete until 9pm and the log is written at 8:44? Thanks

Hi Garry, Please try to give everyone permission on the folder with full control also removed the $ sign from the unc path. If this doesn’t help, it may be caused by some network issues not related to SharePoint, you can take the backup on the local drive and check the results. Hope it helps. Thanks & Regards. Lily Wu TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.comLily Wu

Thanks Lily, The share is on the local server. I also tried to manually execute a full backup for Central Admin and it failed with the same message (orginally I tried differential backups but then the full would failed so I simply did full farm backups). I'm reluctant to remove the $ as this keeps it hidden from those who would browse and discover the share. Likewise the thought of giving eveyone full control goes against everything I've learned. The idea that there may be a network issue did occurr to me as well but I can't find any issues in the Event viewer. Perhaps I'll try a manual to a wide open share and see how that works. What confuses me is that it sometime works. Thanks Again, Garry

A problem like this could be due to disk performance problems if we are taxing the local disk. You could test this by copying/pasting a huge file (large as the backup file that intermittently fails) from the local disk back to itself in another location on the same local disk. While doing this you would run a perfmon and watch the Disk I/O queue (avg of 9 bad) and Pages per second (avg 800 bad). Ideally you want these numbers to be as close to 0 as possible. If they are not they could be the reason for the backup failing. To rectify this you could backup to a different/faster drive. Simply not using the same disk for the temporary backup process and file backup writing might help alleviate the problem. Since the problem is intermittent you could try to recreate the problem by using a larger file to copy/paste and try to do this during a time frame when you have seen failures in the past. It could be the 'intermittent' problem is actually occurring during a time frame when the local disk is being heavily used for something else like crawling/indexing, etc. Fred Ellis - MSFT

Thanks Fred, I will give that a try. But I'm still curious why in SQL Server Management Studio it tells me the database in question was last backed up about 10 minutes after the log reports the error. I'm using the following line in a batch file: stsadm.exe -o backup -directory "\\server\sharepointbackup$" -backupmethod Full the script is set to run daily at 8:30pm Can I run a SQL backup from SQL Server Management Studio? Thanks Garry

I will be honest. I have never used the -directory option in stsadm. You can do SQL backups instead and they are more reliable than the stsadm backups. Stsadm can cause corruption in backups unless the site collections involved in the backup are locked first. - following write up on stsadm states you should lock your site collections before backing them up http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263441(office.12).aspx - following write up on backup/restore recommends using SQL backups for databases larger than 15 GB http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc706871(office.12).aspx The only time I would use stsadm backup/restore would be if I wanted to move a site collection out of a content database and into a different one. For example if you had two very large site collections and wanted to segregate them into their own content databases for ease of disaster recovery. For a regular grandfather, father, son type backup strategy in case of disaster recovery needs I would use SQL backups.Fred Ellis - MSFT

Thanks Fred, My database is over the 15GB so we've switched to the SQL method. Thanks Garry