SQL Server: Determine backup location from physical_device_name field

Question

I am working on a SQL Server database and ran the following command to figure out where the database is backing up to:

SELECT TOP 1 M.physical_device_name
FROM msdb..backupset S
JOIN msdb..backupmediafamily M ON M.media_set_id=S.media_set_id
WHERE S.database_name = 'MyDB'

The physical_device_name says: HTSQLServerMyDB

I don't see any maintenance plans or jobs that I can figure out that do this backup. I am trying to figure out where it is doing this backup. If I go into Server Objects then Backup Devices it is empty. How can I determine where are my backups?

I am running SQL Server 2016 (13.0.4001.0).

Answer 1

Does this StackOverflow answer point you in the right direction? Specifically if you look at the device_type column from the backupmediafamily table, what do you see? You can find the list of types in the API doc:

2 = Disk

5 = Tape

7 = Virtual device

9 = Azure Storage

105 = A permanent backup device.

I'm almost wondering if that's a CNAME or some sort of name reference to the actual path, but it may be dependent on the above.

This is likely the relevant part from the above answer to what you're seeing:

You should notice that these backups have value 7 in the column "device_type" (7 means Virtual device). These rows are actually very useful, for example it help to know that the Virtual Machine backups are running full database backups on a SQL Server instance.

There's no trace of these backup files since they are above the scope of the virtual machine (above the level of your machine) - these are triggered by the host (Hyper-V or VMware for example).