I won't go into massive details on the reasons behind running the manual snapshot but a brief summary;
I've inherited a few Servers/Instances/DBs, including a very old one that needs migrating. I'm reviewing a lot of documentation around this and best practices as I'm unfamiliar with migrations (all being tested before any live migration happens!) and the pre-migration
advice includes completing DBCC CheckDB on the DBs to make sure they're in a consistent state.
I'm currently running through the DBCC CheckDB for the system databases but MSDB and Master are in use. I understand a workaround is to manually create a snapshot.
When I attempt the snapshot creation it errors stating that it cannot make the file a sparse file and to make sure the file system supports sparse files.
I haven't been able to establish why this is an issue.
I've read through documentation which lead me to the below potential solutions (file system type, error logs, different location etc);
The file system is NTFS.
There are currently no sparse files.
There is nothing additional in the error logs.
If I attempt a different drive I get a permissions error, so unable to verify if this works on a different drive.
SQL server 2012 - though I don't believe that matters for this issue.
I haven't been able to find anything further so far.
Although I'm currently doing this on a test/development environment and could possibly take DBs offline/kill spids to potentially resolve DBCC CheckDB issues, I want to treat the issue as though it were a live environment (ie avoiding taking DBs offline where
possible) in preparation for the migration.