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Why can’t I shrink the Unused Disk Space

Past weekend I encountered a situation  where there was insufficient disk space due to logfull errors. As usual I identified the log file that needed to be shrunk and attempted to shrink the file. However, to my surprise it didn’t want to shrink and threw the following error.

Msg 3023, Level 16, State 2, Line 1
Backup, file manipulation operations (such as ALTER DATABASE ADD FILE) and encryption changes on a database must be serialized. Reissue the statement after the current backup or file manipulation operation is completed.


Following is the screenshot of the unused space of the database files




For a moment I thought it was something wrong with the database. But later realised that there were conflict of interest to the logfile usage and whatever the operation that was using it.

This could have been caused due to active transaction in the transaction log due to replication,mirroring , logshipping , some datamilipulation or a backup in progress. Within moments it was obvious it was the backup that was executing longer than usual. But for a database backups to take so long I knew the transaction log had to be hammered considerably. The database in concern had replication configured and later found that the staging process was in full flow which might have caused the backup process to take long time in taking a consistent state of the database.


As soon as the backup came to a halt the shrink process succeeded. 

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