In our development environment we have long been using a particular backup and restore script for each of our products through various SQL Server versions and different environment configurations with no issues.
Recently we have upgraded to SQL Server 2012 as our standard development server with SQL Compatibility Level 2005 (90) to maintain support with legacy systems. Now we find that on one particular dev's machine we get the following error when attempting to backup the database:
Cannot use the backup file 'D:\MyDB.bak' because it was originally formatted with sector size 512 and is now on a device with sector size 4096. BACKUP DATABASE is terminating abnormally.
With the command being:
BACKUP DATABASE MyDB TO DISK = N'D:\MyDB.bak' WITH INIT , NOUNLOAD , NAME = N'MyDB backup', NOSKIP , STATS = 10, NOFORMAT
The curious thing is that neither the hardware nor partitions on that dev's machine have changed, even though their sector size is different this has not previously been an issue.
From my research (i.e. googling) there is not a lot on this issue apart from the advice to use the WITH BLOCKSIZE option, but that then gives me the same error message.
With my query being:
BACKUP DATABASE MyDB TO DISK = N'D:\MyDB.bak' WITH INIT , NOUNLOAD , NAME = N'MyDB backup', NOSKIP , STATS = 10, NOFORMAT, BLOCKSIZE = 4096
Can anyone shed some light on how I can backup and restore a database to HDDs with different sector sizes?
This issue is caused by different sector sizes used by different drives.
You can fix this issue by changing your original backup command to:
BACKUP DATABASE MyDB TO DISK = N'D:\MyDB.bak' WITH INIT , NOUNLOAD , NAME = N'MyDB backup', STATS = 10, FORMAT
Note that I've changed NOFORMAT to FORMAT and removed NOSKIP.
Found a hint to resolving this issue in the comment section of the following blog post on MSDN: SQL Server–Storage Spaces/VHDx and 4K Sector Size
And more information regarding 4k sector drives: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/01/13/sql-server-new-drives-use-4k-sector-size.aspx