Snapshots interfering with differential backups

1- Setup full backs to happen Saturday nights.
2- Setup differential backups to happen every night, execpt Saturdays
3- This is on a VM machine, and we take a snapshot of it every Wednesday night.
4- SQL Server records the snapshot as a valid, full backup, although it is marked as is_snapshot = 1.
5- All differential backups after the snapshot are rendered useless. They are done based on the snapshot backup, not on the actual valid full backup done on Saturday.
After research I found KB article 951288 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951288). Apparently this is a Microsoft issue.
So, how do we tell SQL server to ignore the snapshot backup when doing the differential backups? And no, we do not want to stop doing our snapshots on Wednesdays. Is there a solution or a work around to this?
This is really annoying and dangerous that SQL Server would consider these snapshots as valid, viable full backups on which to base its differential backups.
Help much appreciated,
Raphael
rferreira

Hi Raphael,
According to the following document, virtualization Snapshots for Hyper-V or for any virtualization vendor are not supported to use with SQL Server in a virtual machine. I want to confirm whether there is any other important application running on the VM
machine. If not, we can turn off VM Snapshot, if the VM machine failed, we just need to restore the database backup. For more detail information, please refer to the following link:
Support policy for Microsoft SQL Server products that are running in a hardware virtualization environment
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=956893
Allen Li
TechNet Community Support

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    Hi... Balmukund
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    select
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    state_desc,is_in_standby
    from sys.databases
    HTH...

  • Differential backup cleanup tasks leave empty files behind

    Hello,
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    The views, opinions, and posts do not reflect those of my company and are solely my own. No warranty, service, or results are expressed or implied.

  • Differential backup files are almost the same size as full backups.

    Hello All,
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    F:\Backup\Diff\Pre_Upgrade_OE.dif 2014-02-08 21:14:36.000 I
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    F:\Backup\Full\my_database_backup_2015_03_11_160923_9651022.bak 2015-03-07 02:58:26.000 D
    F:\Backup\Diff\my_database_backup_2015_03_11_162343_7071022.dif 2015-03-07 02:58:26.000 I
    F:\Backup\TLog\my_database_backup_2015_03_11_162707_4781022.trn 2015-03-07 02:58:26.000 L
    F:\Backup\TLog\my_database_backup_2015_03_11_164411_5825904.trn 2015-03-07 02:58:26.000 L
    F:\Backup\TLog\my_database_backup_2015_03_11_200004_1011022.trn 2015-03-07 02:58:26.000 L
    F:\Backup\TLog\my_database_backup_2015_03_12_000005_4201022.trn 2015-03-07 02:58:26.000 L
    F:\Backup\Diff\my_database_backup_2015_03_12_000005_4441022.dif 2015-03-07 02:58:26.000 I
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