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Fred12's avatar
Fred12
Level 4
10 years ago

Backup job running forever

Our backup jobs start running but then after a while they stop.
The monitor says they are still running but the byte counter stops incrementing and the transfer rate slowly decreases.

All services are running on the servers that are to be backed up.

There are no error messages or alerts.

The current job backed up 2GB in 11 minutes but has now been running for over an hour and it is still showing 2GB.

Anyone got any ideas?

We are running 2010 R2.
This has been running OK for the last year or so but for the last week several jobs have stalled.

 

  • First, I would recommend an upgrade to 2010 R3. Existing licenses can be used and the upgrade is pretty straight forward.

    Secondly, double-click the job from the Job Monitor and check on which resource the backup is on. Check the event viewer of the server where the resource exists for any errors / warnings. Also, check the state of the VSS writers on that server.

6 Replies

  • First, I would recommend an upgrade to 2010 R3. Existing licenses can be used and the upgrade is pretty straight forward.

    Secondly, double-click the job from the Job Monitor and check on which resource the backup is on. Check the event viewer of the server where the resource exists for any errors / warnings. Also, check the state of the VSS writers on that server.

  • Thanks for the reply.

    R2 has been running OK for over a year so I don't want to upgrade and introduce other factors.

    There are no events that I can see on the server that could relate to this.

    How do I check the state of the VSS Writers?

     

    Thanks

     

  • ...on the server in question, type the following in a command prompt:

    vssadmin list writers​

     

  • Thanks Craig

    I ran that command and a lot of them say they ar Waiting to complete.

    Not sure what all this stuff does; is there a particular writer I should be looking at?

    Thanks

  • If the VSS writes mention "Waiting to complete", then there must be relevant events logged in the event viewer of that system. Are there no such events ?

    If there are none, then highly possible the job may just error out after some time and then there should be relevant events logged.

  • Thanks all.

    I restarted the Cryptographic Services which did cause an event to be logged.

    It would appear that my Network Service no longer has permissions to read the registry.

    At least I know where to start now.

    Many thanks for your help.