SQL Server online consultants came across an interesting scenario where one of our client was unable to restore a native SQL Server backup successfully performed from one instance running on Machine A on another instance of SQL Server running on machine B.

If you try to restore the same backup on same instance on the machine A, restore completes successfully without any issues but it always fails when you try to restore the database from same backup file on any other instance on a different host.

Use SQL:

RESTORE LOG dbName FROM DISK = 'D:\Hot backup\dbName.trn' WITH FILE = 2, NORECOVERY

The restore always fails with the below message:

The restore fails with the message similar to

“The media family on device ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\BACKUP\myDB.trn' is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family”.


Please try to remove 'FILE = 2,' it can work on my side.