Availability Group backup preference not changing to primary

Question

I have an availability group setup and I'm using Ola Hallengren backup scripts. At setup of the Availability group, the default option of Prefer Secondary was set, where it should have been changed to primary.

Once I noticed this, I tried to set the backup preference to Primary, but it doesn't change, it stays on Prefer Secondary.

Has anyone come across this before? I'm using the user interface (availability group wizard) to make the change.

Answer 1

I tried to set the backup preference to Primary but it doesn't change, it stays on Prefer Secondary

I'm not sure if you mean the user interface, or if the actual effect of the change didn't occur as you expected. My answer assumes the latter.

To be clear about something that I find a little confusing: this setting is not something that automatically affects how backups are run. It's simply a place where you, as a DBA, can store "metadata" about how you prefer backups to be taken.

This is documented, but it's not obvious at all from the user interface. Here's the quote from the docs:

❕ Important

There is no enforcement of the AUTOMATED_BACKUP_PREFERENCE setting. The interpretation of this preference depends on the logic, if any, that you script into back jobs for the databases in a given availability group. The automated backup preference setting has no impact on ad hoc backups.

After setting this, you need to update your backup jobs with code like this (also lifted from the docs):

IF (NOT sys.fn_hadr_backup_is_preferred_replica(@DBNAME))  
BEGIN  
      Select 'This is not the preferred replica, exiting with success';  
      RETURN 0 - This is a normal, expected condition, so the script returns success  
END  
BACKUP DATABASE @DBNAME TO DISK=<disk>  
   WITH COPY_ONLY;  

Using sp_helptext to view the source of sys.fn_hadr_backup_is_preferred_replica, it can be seen that this takes into account both the AG-level AUTOMATED_BACKUP_PREFERENCE setting, and the replica-level BACKUP_PRIORITY setting.

Note: since you're using Ola's scripts, this is already taken into account

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If you just didn't see the value change in the user interface, I would suggest using the "script" button to show the T-SQL that's being run by the UI, and then running that script manually to see if the change is properly made.