Vault Database Backup Size

ZackJones · Post by **ZackJones** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 9:47 am

Greetings,

As part of our nightly maintenance plan we do a full back up of the vault database and transaction log. Today I was looking at the size of the backup files and noticed something quite odd. During the period of 11/14 - 11/21 the backup size was approximately 140 megs. The backup that was created last night jumped to 279 megs. This morning I created another backup of the database using Enterprise Manager and it too was 279 megs.

Is there anything I can check in the vault admin tool or SQL Server to give me some idea why our backup file nearly doubled in size overnight? We're using version 3.1.2.3511 for all clients and server. Database is SQL Server 2000 running on Windows 2000 server machine.

Zack

Post by **jclausius** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 10:07 am

Many factors could explain the increase.

When you back up from Enterprise Manager, are you telling it to initilalize / overwrite any previous backups in the file?

Is it possible data was added to the database grew from last week to cause the size increase?

If you are doing full backups are you truncating the log upon completion?

ZackJones · Post by **ZackJones** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 10:31 am

jclausius wrote:Many factors could explain the increase.

When you back up from Enterprise Manager, are you telling it to initilalize / overwrite any previous backups in the file?

Is it possible data was added to the database grew from last week to cause the size increase?

If you are doing full backups are you truncating the log upon completion?

Hi Jeff,

In EM I did have "Append to media" checked instead of "Overwrite existing media" Under the options tab for Backup in EM I had checks in "Remove inactive entries from transaction log" and "Check media set name and backup set expiration, but what is odd is media set name was blank and Backup set will expire options were disabled. I suppose I should have removed the check from check media set name and backup set expiration option.

As far as new data being added, I'm the vault administrator and I haven't added any new repositories so the only other possibility that I can think of is someone added a ton of files to one of the existing repositories.

FWIW, I just did another backup specifying the "Overwrite existing media" option and the size is now back down to 140 megs. I guess somehow two days worth of backups were appended to the same backup file.

I'll check things on Monday and see how they look. Thanks for the quick replay and I hope you and the rest of the Sourcegear gang have a happy turkey day tomorrow.