Backup copy immediately mode and transaction logs

[FrancWest]

Hi,

I expected the new immediate mode of the backup copy to also fire when only a new transaction log backup is being made, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. It starts copying when a normal backup is being made.

I wanted to do a normal backup once a day and an sql transaction log backup every 15 minutes and copy the backup and transaction logs off-site, but this doesn’t seem to work and I have to revert back to the old way of taking normal backups every hour and script the start of a new copy cycle in order not to loose too many data.

Is my assumption correct?

Franc

[FrancWest]

never mind, it actually works as it should. I still had my backup job active which runs every hour and does a transaction log backup every 15 minutes. Once I changed this to run every 6 hours and still do a transaction log backup every 15 minutes, the transaction log backup copy task appears in the running session and it copies the transaction logs every 15 minutes.

There's a small issue however, once the transaction log backup copy has finished you can't see the results anywhere. The immediate backup copy job itself shows as 'stopped' with a last run time of the normal backup copy, not the transaction log backup copy. Double clicking on the copy job only shows the details of the copy job, not the transaction log copy job. You also cannot scroll through the results of past sessions with the cursor key in the details window of the immediate copy job, it only shows the last result.

A transaction log backup runs continuously and you can always see it running, but this is not the case for the transaction log backup copy job.

[Dima P.]

Hello Franc,

once the transaction log backup copy has finished you can't see the results anywhere. The immediate backup copy job itself shows as 'stopped' with a last run time of the normal backup copy, not the transaction log backup copy. Double clicking on the copy job only shows the details of the copy job, not the transaction log copy job. You also cannot scroll through the results of past sessions with the cursor key in the details window of the immediate copy job, it only shows the last result.

Can you please check if you can right click the backup copy job with transaction log copy enabled and under statistics' drop down menu select the log backup option to display the stats? Also transaction log backup copy session should be displayed under history node as running. Cheers!

[FrancWest]

That indeed shows the details of the transaction log backup, but not the individual sessions? This is what it shows:

Job started at 24-2-2020 12:21:03
Building VMs list 00:00
Copied 266 log bundles with total size of 118,8 MB
Copied 228 log backups with total size of 55,5 MB for machine <server name> 01:20:21

But were are copying transaction logs every 15 minutes, where are all those sessions?

[Dima P.]

Franc,

Thanks! That's an aggregated view, sessions related to every vm and log processing should be kept under history node.

[Gostev]

Consider this UI and job performance optimization for this view... there would be too much individual sessions to handle with those very low RPOs we support for transaction log backups. We saw this approach causing issues, especially with installations on SQL Express.

[FrancWest]

History also shows the same info when right clicking, not the individual sessions. Would it be an idea to specify the 'from' and 'to' times in these aggregates views? For example:

Copied 266 log bundles with total size of 118,8 MB from 12:00 until 15:30 (or something like that).

[Gostev]

This is a good idea.