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zak2011's avatar
zak2011
Level 6
13 years ago
Solved

exchange backup sets failed

Hi,

 

I encountered exchange backup errors last night with the following message

Job ended: 18. mai 2012 at 00:28:58 Completed status: Failed Final error: 0xe000ff12 - A communications failure has occurred with an Exchange Store resource. Final error category: Resource Errors For additional information regarding this error refer to link V-79-57344-65298

In the job logs , it says Exchange store not responding for 6 databases. I tried checking the event logs on exchange server and it does not show anything specific. Also the VSS writers state seem to be stable.

Thanks!

  • Mmm...many reasons why RAWS fails (AV scanning the beremote.exe service; server restarts and the service is set to manual; something that needs to be patched to allow it to resume normal functioning). These are some of the things you need to check for, and sometimes, it corrupts, so an uninstall/push-install works.

    Your VSS error is related to Windows. A server restart, or VSS *.dll reregister will sort this out normally, and if it occurs with the Windows backup utility, then it definitely is Windows-related. This would require a call with Microsoft, as it effectively rules out BE.

  • Hi zak,

     

    It sometimes happens that the RAWS agent on a target server crashes which can lead to the error you received.

    Check and see if this was/is the case, and whether or not the RAWS agent is publishing correctly to your media server.

    Thanks!

    http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH168651

  • Hi Craig,

    The article describes the same issue i was facing. However as the version I am using is BE2012, i am not sure how to go about it.

    Thanks!

     

  • Hi Zak,

    Check on your exchange server or the media server if the Remote agent service crashed, this will be logged in the event viewer during the time you get the errors in the joblog.

    Also are you using Exchange 2003 or 2007 or 2010? Is it possible for you to run separate jobs of different databases and try to isolate if there is any specific database which gives you the problem.

    One more thing you can do is to check at what time your jobs are running and check if another application like a AV is not running its scans at the same time as the backup is happening.

    Some more information on your environment and the way your Exchange jobs are configured would be of great help in understanding the problem.

    Thanks.

  • Hi Ashwin,

    Thanks for your response, My environment consists of Backup Exec 2012 running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard to backup Exchange server 2010.

    The jobs are configured to run a daily incremental and a weekly Full. I checked the event logs and the following  error is logged

    Backup Exec Alert: Job Failed
    (Server: "BACKUPSRVXX") (Job: "EXCHSRVXX.company.local-Exchange Databases-Incremental") EXCHSRVXX.company.local-Exchange Databases-Incremental -- The job failed with the following error: A communications failure has occurred with an Exchange Store resource.

    I have not tried running a seperate job of the different databases. I checked with the Exchange Admin and confirmed that there were no issues with any of the Exchange databases. However i could try running seperate jobs for those databases to be certain.

    Currently there are no AV running on the Exchange server.

    Hope the info is sufficient.

    Thanks!

  • Hi,

    I tried running an exchange incremental backup now and i got the following error

    V-79-57344-6404 - Snapshot Technology: Initialization failure on: "\\EXCHSRVxx.company.local\Microsoft Information Store\STH-DB00 1GB". Snapshot technology used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Snapshot technology error (0xE0001904): A failure occurred querying the Writer status. Writer Name: Exchange Server, Writer ID: {76FE1AC4-15F7-4BCD-987E-8E1ACB462FB7}, Last error: The VSS Writer failed, but the operation can be retried (0x800423f3), State: Failed during prepare snapshot operation (8). Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.

    The databases that previously gave errors worked this time except for the above database. Did this error happen because the exchange backup was run during the time when the database was being used by users?

     

    I tried to backup thie individual database in question and it keeps failing. Now the VSS writers for Exchange shows retryable. Is there any way to avoid a restart of Exchange.

    Thanks!

  • Hi Zak,

    For Exchange online backups it does not matter if the Exchange database is being active, the whole point of the Exchange agent based online backup is not to interrupt the normal working of your Exchange databases. But the way backup happens is by taking a snapshot using VSS of the Exchange DB, now to take a snapshot, VSS tries to quiesce the DB, but if it is unable to do so properly due to the high activity happening on the database the writers fail and go in the retryable state.

    There are other solutions like increasing VSS timeouts etc but I would recommend talking to MS before implementing such solutions. The easiest way to do reset writers is to reboot the exchange server as you have already stated. But before that you can try doing the first workaround mentioned in the following technote;

    http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH141370

    The second option in the technote is a reboot of the Exchange server.

  • Thanks for the airticle, Craig. However the exchange admin rebooted the server prior to your post and the backups are working now. Is there any reason why the RAWS agent would crash occasionally on Exchange.

    When the backups failed with error messages 'store not responding', i retried the backups and the backups worked for the databases which failed, however one of the databases said snapshot intialization error and when i tried backing up the same database it didnt work.If this occurs again, should i retry the backups immediately or just it run at the scheduled time.

    Thanks!

  • Mmm...many reasons why RAWS fails (AV scanning the beremote.exe service; server restarts and the service is set to manual; something that needs to be patched to allow it to resume normal functioning). These are some of the things you need to check for, and sometimes, it corrupts, so an uninstall/push-install works.

    Your VSS error is related to Windows. A server restart, or VSS *.dll reregister will sort this out normally, and if it occurs with the Windows backup utility, then it definitely is Windows-related. This would require a call with Microsoft, as it effectively rules out BE.