...at least I think so.
I recently revamped my backup routine on my development server. I created a maintenance plan for user databases that did some weekly cleanup tasks, daily full backups and transactionlog backups at key points throughout the day.
All has been working well until today, when a received an email notifying me that the lunchtime backup had failed. The log viewer didn't reveal much, other than that a certain number of DBs were backed up success fully, before ending the log entry with:
[snipped] Source: ... The package execution fa... The step failed.
Not exactly revealing
It occurred to me that the only change to previous attempts was that I'd created a new (small and unremarkable) database this morning.
I restarted the SQL Server Agent, and tried manually re-running the (transaction log backup) step but it failed again.
However, running the full backup step (thus creating the first full backup for my new DB) worked - furthermore, re-running the transaction log backup step again also worked.
It appears that the transaction log backup struggled because of the lack of a full backup or previous transaction log backup.
Is this the expected behaviour? On the one hand, at a primitive level this sort of makes sense, but really, I'd expect it to handle such a scenario more gracefully.
If so, is there a way to automatically handle this? It won't happen that often, but I can't be relied to remember to backup the DB when I create it, especially since it's only in the early stages of development.
If not, what is the likely cause of this behaviour? Can I avoid it?