Change the backup for tonight to start at 7pm!

Unless someone has added a bpstart_notify script to stop SQL services, I will take a bet that it is NOT NBU doing this. Create bpfis and bpbkar log folders to trace NBU actions.

Please ensure that *.mdf, *.ldf, *.ndf are excluded.

Ask system owner for text output of Event Viewer Application log and System log.

Excellent advice from Marianne - I would check your bpstart_notify.bat before looking anywhere else - I cannot imagine anything else causing this apart from some sort of out of disk space / out of memory situation caused by the start of the backup

yep. bpstart_notify_policy name.bat file brings down application service, then once backup is over bpend would bring the service up.

is this possible that bpstart_notify brought services down but due to some problem network issue or disk down bpend_notify was not called.

You need bpbkar log to see if bpend was called. Also look for <Install_path>\netbackup\bin\BPEND_RES

bpend is called is called even if backup failed. In the parameters passed to the script, %5 specifies the status of the operation.

You need to double-check logic in the script to see what action is specified in case of failure.

Some additional thoughts and observations:

1. It seems that neither you nor the SQL dba knew about the bpstart_notify
2. notify scripts must have been in place for some time, working well
3. Seemingly downtime on the database is no longer acceptable
4. Downtime using this method is needed for the duration of the backup - could mean many hours

If all of the above is true, it is advisable to consider different backup stragegies without start and end scripts, such as:

1. NetBackup for SQL agent that can be used to make online, hot backups of all databases.
2. SQL dba's do backups to disk. Backup the disk backups with Windows policy.

MOST companies use above methods as lengthy downtime of databases cannot be tollerated.