I reviewed the other posts about backups and don't see anything like this. I
have a Vista Home Premium laptop on which I run SQL Server 2005 Management
Studio Express; I use it to support a test copy of a DotNetNuke site I
support. I have no trouble downloading copies of the production SQL backups
and restoring from them; but every time I try to make a local backup of my
test database, using the menus in Management Studio Express, the "Back Up
Database" task hangs somewhere around 50% done, and never completes. If I'm
really unlucky, it hangs everything on the system and I have to shut it down
hard.

I originally did this with "append to existing media" checked even though I
wanted to create a new backup. The last time, I told it to create a new
backup and gave it a new name and file location; I told it to use new media
and gave it the name of the new file. It's still hanging (although it hasn't
hung the rest of the system. Yet.) - the little green progress circle has
quit moving, but I have an hourglass next to my cursor in that window. As I
look at the folder where I told it to put the backup file, the files do exist
- there are 2 partial files from today (one around 41MB and one around 20MB,
they should be 63MB), so it's trying to do something. Am I just not waiting
long enough? How long does this take?

Am I doing something obvious and stupid that would cause this? Any
suggestions deeply appreciated. I'd really like to be able to take backups.
--
hedera

Nature bats last.

hedera (hedera (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com) writes:
How long a backup takes depends on the size of the database. But since this
is Express, the database should not exceed 4GB, and a backup of a 4GB
database should take at most 10 minutes on a slow system.

Run the BACKUP command from a query window:

BACKUP DATABASE db TO DISK ='c:\backup\db.bck' WITH INIT, STATS = 10

and see what happens.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel (AT) sommarskog (DOT) se

Links for SQL Server Books Online:
SQL 2008: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/cc514207.aspx
SQL 2005: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb895970.aspx
SQL 2000: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinf...ons/books.mspx