Any other solutions for SQL's "The media set has 2 media families but only 1 are provided. All members must be provided." error?

Question

I am trying to restore a 200mb database into SQL 2008 and I am getting this error "The media set has 2 media families but only 1 are provided. All members must be provided.". I did some research and found out that this happens when two destination files was specified during the backup process. I obviously didn't specify two file destinations while I was backing up, but I am not sure with that coz most people say this happens by accident (facepalm). I did some more googling for possible solutions but all were pointing out that the only solution is to redo the backup process or find the other file, which are both not possible in my situation because the server has already been shutdown and I have already deleted all my files from that server (who knew my .bak file would fail?). But I really need to restore the database in my local machine for some data that we need for the remaining transactions that we have in our site before we shut it down.

Anyone?

Answer 1

Codeguy007 is pretty much correct. This error occurs if you specify two different backup locations in your INITIAL backup and then attempt to restore from only one of the two backup files that are created during the backup process. If your server is already down and wiped then you are hosed. But for future reference, you need to:

1. Begin the backup wizard process
2. Ensure that only one backup location is specified
3. On the options page, click on 'Back up to a new media set...' and specify a new name and description

All future restores from this location should work just fine.

Answer 2

See this thread. The Microsoft Project Manager for SQL Backup explains the error.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqltools/thread/abf50e00-c9b0-4809-9e61-43ed8a53e968/

Basically you can stripe your backup across 2 files (Like RAID 0 not what he said) and if you try to restore from only one file you get this error. You need both files to restore and you can't recover from only one file. I don't know what to tell you, maybe you are getting the error message by mistake. Otherwise, I hope you didn't do a scrub on that old server's drives.

Answer 3

Having just gone through this myself, I just wanted to confirm what others have said and give a warning. When I first tried to create a backup from a 2008 R2 from the Wizard, the backup destination already had a 'NULL' destination added automatically.

Not realizing, I simply added another file location, so the end result was a file with only half the data.

such a stuff up!

Answer 4

I also learned this via experience.

So make sure you create your backup file using one media set or one file only so that you will not have a problem restoring it on the future: