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Nuri_Inuki's avatar
Nuri_Inuki
Level 4
12 years ago

BE2010R3 - AOFO: Initialization failure using VSS - VSS Snapshot Failed

Backup was working fine for a few months and then all of a sudden I started getting this error.  Weird thing is that I didn't tell it to use AOFO option when backing up...so not sure why I'm getting ...
2010
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Backing Up
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
Configuring
  • Nuri_Inuki's avatar
    Nuri_Inuki
    12 years ago

    Okay, I finally figured out the issue.  First, enabling AOFO did not address the issue.

    I ended up going onto the server that was throwing the errors and ran a "vssadmin list writers."  I saw a bunch of writers listed of which two of them had "State: Failed" and "Last Error: No Error."  Further research suggested that the associated services needed to be restarted to address these kinds of failure.  For me, the services were Cryptographic Services and IIS Admin Services.  Once I did that, all the writers was in a stable state and my backups no longer failed.

    For a list of services associated with the writers:

    http://activelydirect.blogspot.com/2011/01/resolving-system-state-backup-failures.html

Nuri_Inuki's avatar
Nuri_Inuki
Level 4
12 years ago

Last admin who built the job did not have it enabled.  When I rebuilt the job, I thought we had to pay for that option, so I didn't enable it either.

Will enabling AOFO address this issue?  How do you re-register the VSS dlls?  I've already tried rebooting the machine and that didn't fix the issue (Windows Server 2003 SP2).