Sunday, February 20, 2011

Error Message when dumping to hard drive backup device

Justin writes "When I dump to a hard drive backup device, several of my database backups fail with the following information (in the event log of NT 4.0) . . .
Event ID: 17055
Source: MSSQLServer
Type: Information
Category: Kernel
Description: 3266: The Microsoft Tape Format (MTF) soft filemark database on backup device 'POD01_DUMP' cannot be read, inhibiting random access.

Basically, this error message reads like a tape drive problem, but I am dumping my files to hard drive using the "Dump Database....with INIT" commands within a job to do it. Technet has nothing to say on the matter, except to indicate that this an error of severity type 10, and I have also checked with other SQL sources to no avail.


After a couple of emails back and forth on this for more details the answer actually came from Spyder (Brent). Apparently the backup process was interrupted and this caused the BAK file to become corrupt. This also made it impossible to restore from the BAK file which was another reported symptom. The BAK files were deleted and recreated and all works fine now. Credit to Spyder.

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