Trouble backing up remote database from local server I have 2 servers LOCAL and REMOTE. REMOTE has a database 'remotedb'.

From REMOTE the following statement backs up the database just fine.

BACKUP DATABASE [remotedb] TO  DISK = N'C:\Temp\remotedb.bak' 


Now I want to issue the backup from LOCAL. From LOCAL I create a linked server to REMOTE.

exec sp_addlinkedserver 'REMOTE'


From LOCAL I issue the same statement...

BACKUP DATABASE [remotedb] TO  DISK = N'C:\Temp\remotedb.bak' 


I get the following error message...

Msg 911, Level 16, State 11, Line 3
Database 'remotedb' does not exist. Make sure that the name is entered correctly.
Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 3
BACKUP DATABASE is terminating abnormally.


I am SYSADMIN on both SQL Servers. Can someone tell me why I am not able to issue a backup command from LOCAL for remotedb and what can I do to make this work?

Much thanks!
As is the command is trying to execute on your LOCAL instance and not REMOTE. You need to have it execute through the linked server itself. You can build the query as a dynamic statement and then simply execute the query against sp_executesql on the linked server. So something like this should:

DECLARE @qry varchar(2000)
SET @qry = 'BACKUP DATABASE [remotedb] TO  DISK = N''C:\Temp\remotedb.bak'''
EXEC REMOTE.master.dbo.sp_executesql @qry