Determine Physical Device Name for a backupset.

  • I am running the folowing query:

    SELECT TOP 1 M.physical_device_name

    FROM msdb..backupset S

    JOIN msdb..backupmediafamily M ON M.media_set_id=S.media_set_id

    WHERE S.database_name = 'Gecko'

    AND s.type = 'D'

    ORDER by backup_start_date DESC

    which returns the following physical_device_name: '{80F398C7-58AC-4DC6-BC15-0B2BE1A62C8E}8'

    The physical address is in fact: 'E:\MSSQL\Backup\Gecko_db_200809301808.BAK'

    What would this guid be pointing at?

  • That query should work... are you using any 3rd party tools to run the backup?

  • The backup is run by a 'Database Maintenance Plan' (which I did not setup) with a vanilla set of parameters for a daily backup.

    However, a clue to the oddity may be in the following BackupMediaFamily record for the backup:

    media_set_id: 14133

    family_sequence_number:1

    media_family_id:B3A6F86C-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

    media_count: 1

    logical_device_name: NULL

    physical_device_name: 80F398C7-58AC-4DC6-BC15-0B2BE1A62C8E}8

    device_type: 7

    physical_block_size: 1024

    I do not know what device_type: 7 is?

    thanks

  • Device type 7 is a virtual device.

    Are you doing other backups (as well as via a maintenance plan) using 3rd party tools e.g. Veritas Backup Exec?

  • Thanks for that

    The database is first backed up by Maintenance Plan to a physical file, and then by Backup Exec SQL Server agent. Just had to look a little further.

    I now know that virtual device backups will return a guid....

    This issue is now closed.

  • Jamie Johnson-406551 (10/2/2008)


    Thanks for that

    The database is first backed up by Maintenance Plan to a physical file, and then by Backup Exec SQL Server agent. Just had to look a little further.

    I now know that virtual device backups will return a guid....

    This issue is now closed.

    can you please help me how to resolve this issue.

    I have same problem

    Please

  • I encoutered same problem in jobs using maintenance plans with standard backup tasks.Resave maintenance plans solved the problem.

  • I encountered same problem. The rows in msdb.dbo.backupmediafamily with

    physical_device_name in format '{76F.........}9} results of periodic backups databases by VMReplicator . in error log of instance you may find :

    Database backed up: Database .... device information:(FILE=1,TYPE=VIRTUAL_DEVICE:{'{76F.......}9'}) .Solution probably is ignore rows with device_type=7 in msdb.dbo.backupmediafamily when you

    look for "last" local backup.

  • We recently implemented a new 3rd party backup device but and now we intend to move from he old backup device which seems to be failing .

    Problem- When a backup fails , we currently do not know which of the backup device it was on without doing further digging because both backup devices show up as GUIDS with random hexadecimals as the physical device name.

    Is there any way/script that could Alias these GUIDS as lets say "Tivoli or 'Redgate" please assistance would be appreciated

    Desired outcome- To be able to run a sql script to actually confirm that a certain database is actually backed up to Tivoli

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