Press "Enter" to skip to content

Availability Group Backup Preferences

Shaun Stuart points out that the Backup Preferences tab of the Availability Group Properties for an AG is a little tricky:

The default, and the way my AG was configured, was Prefer Secondary. As the image shows, this means backups will be made on the secondary, unless the secondary is unavailable, in which case, they will be made on the primary.

There are a couple of things to note when you use this setting:

  1. Full backups made on the secondary are Copy Only backups. This means they won’t reset the differential bitmap and your differentials will continue to increase in size until a full backup is made on the primary.

  2. Differential backups cannot be made on the secondary.

  3. Transaction log backups can be made on the secondary and they do clear the log, so your log file will not continue to grow.

Read on for more details.