SQL Backups Failed? Your Snapshots Might Be Lying to You

Iris Li

Hi everyone,
Ever had that sinking feeling when your VM backup says "success" but your SQL restore craps out with log corruption? Been there. 😤
Truth bomb: If you’re not forcing app-consistent snaps (VSS for Hyper-V/vCenter Tools for VMware), your DBs are playing Russian roulette. Crash-consistent = "hope it boots."
Do this now:

Check if your backup job logs say "Using VSS" or "quiesced"
TEST restores of actual DBs – not just VM boot!

Anyone else gotten burned by "happy green checkmarks" that lied? How’d you catch it?
Let’s discuss it together！

Sylas Beaumont

Iris Li Preach, Iris. 😭

Two months ago, our "100% successful" backup job from another software crapped out during a real SQL restore.
Turns out the backups were crash-consistent because some genius (me) unchecked “Enable application-aware processing” to “speed things up.” 🙃

Marlon

Iris Li Same. Our ‘working’ backups ignored tempdb LUNs. Cue 12hrs of DBCC CHECKDB screaming. Now we pre-snapshot sp_configure ‘show advanced options’, 1...

sarah

Iris Li That one time the DB seemed fine after restore… until users found garbled order entries 2 days later. VSS "quieted" SQL while reporting services kept writing chaos. Now every "✅ success" gives me trust issues.