MS SQL Server 2008 Standard, ShadowProtect Server Edition 4.0.0.5885 —
On Friday, our client discovered that records were missing from the database. I discovered that the Thursday night SQL backup contained all the missing records. User error is ruled out for multiple reasons.
- All missing records fall within an 8-day range
- The date range began 22 days before Friday and ended 14 days before Friday
- All adds and all changes made during the 8-day range are missing from 14 separate tables
- All missing records are present in the Thursday 11pm backup
- The application logs show no unusual incidents as far as I can see.
I find nothing unusual in the Applications list in the MS SQL Server Event Viewer.
We are running ShadowProtect Server to make image backups of the 2 server drives every hour. The same sort of incident occurred 4 months ago.
ShadowProtect runs an hourly backup of the database.
One theory is that the ShadowProtect Server 4 disk image software, which runs hourly differential backups, somehow caused the data loss during its 9:00 am Friday backup. I am not aware of any other activity. other than normal user accesses, between the normal 11 pm Thursday database backup and the discovery of missing records on Friday.
Thank you for you help. As you can imagine, the client is very concerned.
We never did find out the cause of the lost records. We reinstalled the database in another MS SQL Server instance, upgraded the database to a new release, and migrated the data from the old database to the new one. That seems to have fixed the issue.