The media family on device ' ' is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family

  • The database is running with Simple recovery model and all our backup attempts are FULL backups.

    DBCC CHECKDB (TheCure_CDR) is completely clean

    The BACKUP DATABASE succeeds every time. We’ve backed it up locally, remotely, single file, multi-file, with INIT, with NOINIT, and many other permutations.

    RESTORE HEADERONLY succeeds every time and generates information consistent with the BACKUP DATABASE command

    RESTORE VERIFYONLY and RESTORE DATABASE always fail immediately with this error:

    Msg 3241, Level 16, State 201, Line 1
    The media family on device '<BAK file>' is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family.
    Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
    VERIFY DATABASE is terminating abnormally.

    We’ve tried RESTORE VERIFYONLY and RESTORE DATABASE on the same computer where the backup was taken and on a different computer running the exact same version of SQL Server. This is the version:

    Microsoft SQL Server 2014 (SP2-CU4) (KB4010394) - 12.0.5540.0 (X64)
          Jan 27 2017 03:40:25
          Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation
          Enterprise Edition (64-bit) on Windows NT 6.2 <X64> (Build 9200: ) (Hypervisor)

    A couple notable properties of our database and the circumstances:

    The database has a defunct file group that we cannot remove. It’s been that way for years and we’ve backed up and restored many times.

    The database has memory file groups and one memory optimized table. Again we’ve backed up and restored many times since this became the case.

    The problem started at about the same time we upgraded the database from SP2 to SP2-CU4

    We’ve scoured KBs and forums and have not found a single article directly on point where:
    •    The database is uncorrupted
    •    The backup is repeatable and always succeeds
    •    The restore is on the same server where the backup was taken
    •    RESTORE HEADERONLY always succeeds
    •    RESTORE VERIFYONLY always fails

    Has anyone seen this before?

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