Backup File Transfer error

You’ve been asked by someone at work, to copy over a SQL Server backup file from 1 remote desktop server to another.

So, you connect to both of the remote servers, copy the backup file from rd (remote desktop) 1 and paste it onto rd 2.

You, see a dialog like below show up, where you get confirmation of your file being copied to rd 2.

Since, you’re a good junior DBA, you don’t want to just wait around until this process gets completed, and move over to working on some other tasks assigned to you, or learning new things on YouTube, or reading up on Brent Ozar (brozar) blogs, etc.

You come back a while later, and see the following error:

You’re confused what went wrong, and I don’t blame you. It’s not a very descriptive error dialog.

If this has happened to you for the first time, chances are you’re going to try and do the copy paste process again, and chances are you’ll see the same error again.

The reason why this error pops us is due to a very strange thing. Simply put, you can not use Ctrl + C/ copy anything to clipboard, because once you do that, it interrupts the file copying process (Note: not really a good idea to copy over files using RDP — we’ll talk about that in a future post :D).

So, if you want the backup file to be copied to the second server, make sure to not copy anything else to the clipboard, as you wouldn’t even be prompted with anything, it would just fail the file copy process, and in most cases won’t fail instantly, so you’ll probably not even realize what went wrong.