Backups are one of the critical and primary functions as a DBA. Recently I noticed a failed backup job that runs apart from our enterprise backups. We use these individual backups to refresh non-prod environments for developers to run their queries. I have had these jobs fail with the following error:
Msg 3023, Level 16, State 2, Line 1
Backup, file manipulation operations (such as ALTER DATABASE ADD FILE) and encryption changes on a database must be serialized.
Reissue the statement after the current backup or file manipulation operation is completed.
The job fails as soon as I initiated a re-run. So naturally I went to check what processes are running currently. To do this, I run sp_WhoIsActive. I noticed that a scheduled job from enterprise backup system has been running but ran a little longer than usual. This seems to be causing the error when I tried to run another backup through the SQL Agent job on the same database.
The resolution is that i just waited for the scheduled backup job to complete and re-ran the SQL Agent job and it completed successfully.
Another possible reason for this error is that if we perform a shrink operation in parallel to backup operation. In general, shrink is NOT recommended unless you know that you have deleted a large set of data releasing space that you would like to reclaim.
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