Last weekend, my support engineer and I were at a client site to upgrade SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2012. Before proceeding with any activity, we tried to take a backup and got the given below error that I received it later by my support engineers as shown below.
Let me explain the error and its solution in details.
Message Number: 3023
Severity : 16
Error Message: Backup and file manipulation operations (such as ALTER DATABASE ADD FILE) on a database must be serialized. Reissue the statement after the current backup or file manipulation operation is completed.
Resolution:
If you look at the error description, it seems that there is a transaction going on in the background, and due to this reason SQL Server is not allowing us to take a backup or may be the database is corrupt. So we started doing our basic testing and it seems everything is fine. Then why SQL Server is not allowing us to take a backup ?
So, I thought of executing the given below query to check whether any backup or restore operation is in progress and I found that a scheduled backup was already in progress. Ooopss……….. So we waited for a while and took the backup again.
Conclusion:
Whenever you come across this error, you should check what the processes are in progress in SQL Server. It will give you a hint, why you are unable to take backup. In my case, a scheduled backup was in progress at the same time when I tried to take the backup.