Phantom SQL Server database backups. How can I find the cause? I've noticed from the event log, that something is backing up SQL Server databases, separately to our maintenance plan backups. We can see something running SQL backups at 03:00. Our intended backups only kick off at 04:05.

The backup logs look like this: 


  Database backed up. Database: master, creation date(time):
  2015/11/15(09:39:37), pages dumped: 490, first LSN: 743:441:73, last
  LSN: 743:472:1, number of dump devices: 1, device information:
  (FILE=1, TYPE=VIRTUAL_DEVICE:
  {'{9BCE7BA5-E8AB-4459-8655-365988420F35}12'}).


There seems to be no other backup of the database files themselves which might trigger a volume shadow copy (VSS writer) that we can see, so it's a mystery what's causing these. 

The worry is of course, that these backups will interfere with the restore process for point-in-time restore as we have no access to these full backups, yet they are presumably resetting the transaction log. 

The server is a Virtual Machine and I originally theorised that perhaps something was backing up the entire VM at this time, and perhaps that was causing VSS to create the backups, but apparently there is no machine imaging backup set up on this server - only file based backups of certain folders and the main SQL data folder is not backed up. 

Is there anything I can set up which could provide any clues as to what's running these backups?
This looks like Veeam backups or some other third-party backup tool. Ask your systems guys if they take VM snapshots and backup the SQL server. Make sure you are VERY careful as Veeam can take FULL backups and break your differential base and possibly hose up your restore chain. I believe in Veeam they can do COPY_ONLY backups or set it to not truncate the transaction log, you'll want to make sure they aren't causing your well-planned restore strategy to go down the toilet in the event of disaster.