I have a customer that has set up a full backup of the database to an network path every 4:th minute on a heavy used database. I strongly recommend the customer to not to do that and instead do a transactional backup.
But what is the possibly bad things that can happened when doing a full backup in this way? Other than that the backup will never have correct data because of the database is in heavy use while doing the backup. And the workload of the server.
I have had a couple of sql-related problems (webservice<-sqlconnection->sql) with this customer and want to know technically if this backup scenario can be part of the problem?
Of course I will start to investigate this by stopping the backup while testing and look at eventlogs and so on. But Im curious about if anyone direct can say ‘NOOO, this will lock the X and throw the Y and is BAD’ or something. 😉
If it’s a small database, and I’m guessing it is, it probably won’t do any harm other than a little extra load, but if they need to make sure they don’t lose data, they should be doing daily full backups and log backups every few minutes instead of full backups, and log shipping to a standby server, or set up mirroring.