Contact Us

Correcting Backup Failures With Sitecore Azure App Services

Ken McAndrew, Senior Consultant

I was recently tasked with performing an architectural review for one of our Azure PaaS clients using Sitecore 9.2, and part of this was to review the backups being done on Azure. The Azure SQL backups have their own world, but backing up the app services requires a storage account. Fine, no problem, let me go through the app services...CM is good to go...but CD is failing its nightly backups!

So after a brief panic, I dug into it a bit more. There's fortunately a helpful error message (for once!) saying that the backup had a 10 GB limit, and I was trying to back up 10.3 GB. Now we're not backing up the databases with the app service, so there's theoretically no way we should be getting close to that limit. Until I dug through the file system in Kudu.

The first thing I thought of was logs...we know Sitecore logs a ton, and maybe they were getting overwhelmed. So I decided to walk through the App_Data folder, and I found the answer faster than the logs folder. In the DeviceDetection folder, I found a heap of the device databases, each one many megabytes of data...and all but one of them utterly useless. It seems Sitecore hasn't been cleaning up old copies of the device detection database!

So knowing this now, I confirmed the older items weren't needed (they weren't). Then it was about remediation, and there's a few things we can do.

Read the full blog by clicking here.

Recent Posts

See All