Dangers of Mixing Native Backups and VSS Backups

In today’s modern world of virtualization there are a lot of different ways to backup databases. You’ve got native backups, VSS backups taken by snapshotting the VMs, third party backup tools which take snapshots, etc.

When you have multiple backup techniques all being used at once you run the risk of breaking the LSN chain for your transaction log backups. For your full and differential backups you could end up having a differential backup that you took with one method which is built off of a full backup taken from another backup method. Trying to unwind this during a production down situation becomes very stressful, and depending on the tools which you are using basically impossible to restore from as some tools don’t allow you to restore from them, then restore another layer of backups from another method.

To make life simple and easy to manage only use a single backup method to backup the databases.

Denny

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