DBA Dash Incorrect Backup Report

[aachaemenes]

When VSS Writer backs up databases DBA dash marks the database with a backup. But that is different than having a .bak file for a database. our backup job was missing the backup and dbadash was reporting everything fine. Problem with VSS Writer, is that you have to restore the entire drive. It is not restoring dbs.

[DavidWiseman]

Hi, I don't have much experience with snapshot backups but for many people this will be a valid backup option. Many 3rd party options use snapshot backups and I don't think it's necessarily true that you have to restore the entire drive if snapshot backups are used. I don't think we can start highlighting this as a problem - at least not by default.

DBA Dash captures the last backup from msdb history. On the Backups tab in the GUI there is a "Snapshot Backups" column that indicates if this was performed using a snapshot backup.

A Custom Check could be created to highlight an issue if there are no native backups.

[FuriousDBA]

@DavidWiseman is it possible to add configuration filter on root level of "BackupFULL" tab to not consider Virtual devices (snapshots)?

[DavidWiseman]

There is more complexity to this as the collection only captures the last backup of each type (full, diff, log). This would need to be changed to get the last regular and last snapshot backup. The Backups table schema needs to be changed slightly to accommodate this as it currently only allows 1 row for each backup type. Then a configuration option could be implemented to include/exclude snapshot backups from consideration. I'll probably consider doing this at some point.