Knowledge Base

Backups fail on named instances on custom ports

Category: Troubleshooting & error messages
Date: 20 Nov 2008
Product: SQL Backup
When backing up or restoring a database, the following error may occur:
SQL error 911: Could not locate entry in
sysdatabases for database 'MyDatabase'. No entry found with that name. Make sure that the name is entered correctly.

What could be occurring is that you have got multiple instances of SQL Server on one computer answering on custom TCP ports. If the named pipes protocol is disabled, the SQL Backup Agent may be unable to resolve the query to the correct instance of SQL Server. The error indicates that the database being backed up does not exist because the backup query has been sent to the wrong instance of server by SQL Backup.

SQL Backup 5.4 solves this problem by allowing you to configure the instance name for the server being backed up. This is done by adding a registry key to the SQL Server computer:

HKLM\Software\Red Gate\SQL Backup\BackupSettingsGlobal\<instance name>
or on 64-bit operating systems
HKLM\Software\Wow6432\Red Gate\SQL Backup\BackupSettingsGlobal\<instance name>

Add a new string value called "SQLServerName" and set this to the instance name of the server

Where <instance name> is the named instance of SQL Server, or "(local)" for the default instance.
Once the SQL Backup Server Components have been upgraded and the key added to the registry, SQL Backup will correctly resolve the SQL Server to perform the backup operation upon.