Knowledge Base

Checking the status of a backup or restore

Category: How do I?
Date: 28 May 2009
Product: SQL Backup
While running a backup or restore, how do you know the current status of it?

SQL Backup provides some extended stored procedures as part of the server components installation. One of these, sqbstatus, is a procedure that will show information about any SQL Backup tasks currently executing on the SQL Server.

Running EXEC master..sqbstatus in the master database shows the current status of SQL Backup.

In the results 'Processed (bytes)' represent the uncompressed size, while 'Compressed (bytes)' represent the amount of compressed data that has been processed. Both numbers may be 0 initially because if you are restoring a non-existing database, SQL Server will create a large file at the beginning (depending on the default database size set on the server). Once that file has been created, SQL Backup will proceed to uncompress the data. Depending on your disk speed, the creation of that file by SQL Server may take a while.