SQL Server Backup To Azure Tool Causing Restore Errors

Jack Li diagnoses an issue in which the Microsoft SQL Server Backup to Microsoft Azure Tool causes errors when trying to restore a database on an Azure VM with SQL Server 2008 R2:

I worked on an interesting issue today where a user couldn’t restore a backup.   Here is what this customer did:

1. backed up a database from an on-premises server (2008 R2)
2. copied the file to an Azure VM
3. tried to restore the backup on the Azure VM (2008 R2 with exact same build#)

But he got the following error:

Msg 3241, Level 16, State 0, Line 4
The media family on device ‘c:\temp\test.bak’ is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family.
Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 4
RESTORE HEADERONLY is terminating abnormally.

We verified that he could restore the same backup on the local machine (on-premises).  Initially I thought the file must have been corrupt during transferring.   We used different method to transfer file and zipped the file.  The behavior is the same.   When we backed up a database from the same Azure VM and tried to restore, it was successful.

Click through for Jack’s findings as well as a couple workarounds.