Sometimes, it ought to be obvious....

Over the Christmas break, we moved our Raiser's Edge database files, so they weren't sitting on the c:\ drive (where they installed as default), but on the data drive for that server. One of my colleagues used the BlackBaud Manager for the system, rather than me doing anything clever in the back end.

At which point, the backup job, created via BlackBaud, failed.

First it failed owing to permissions. It decided that it couldn't connect to the (local) server. Easy enough to fix.

Then it failed owing to that hoary old chestnut "[SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 22029)". You know. That really useful error message that has you looking in six different places to find out why it failed: diskspace, file locked, unable to access backup file location etc etc etc. No SQL maintenance plan that I could right click and 'View History' - the thing's done by a T-SQL string invoking xp_sqlmaint. Well, the string *looked* OK: same as the version that did execute successfully when run manually.

Yup. String looked fine. Beautiful syntax. Until the second cup of coffee kicked in.

It helps if you're trying to backup a database that exists! In the process of moving the database files about, the database got renamed. The user connections got updated to reflect this new database name, but not the backup job.

Backups are now running.