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Backup Exec 15 unable to backup System State on Windows 2003

Tarabocchia
Not applicable

We recently switched from using Backup Exec 2012 to Backup Exec 15.  Backup Exec 15 runs a server that has Windows Server 2012 R2.  We have discovered that the system state backup of all our Windows 2003 servers are failing with the following error:

 

BackupV-79-57344-65233 - Snapshot Technology: Initialization failure on: "\\Server.CORP.COM\System?State". Snapshot technology used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

Snapshot technology error (0xE000FED1): A failure occurred querying the Writer status. See the job log for details about the error.

Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.

Writer Name: Event Logs, Writer ID: {EEE8C692-67ED-4250-8D86-390603070D00}, Last error: The VSS Writer failed. The operation cannot be retried (0x800423f4), State: Failed during prepare snapshot operation (8).

 

We did not have this problem with Backup Exec 2012.  Is there a known issue with Backup Exec 15 backing up the system state of 2003 servers?  Any suggestions of what I can try to fix this problem?  I found an article of system state backup problems with Backup Exec 2014 and the solution was to uncheck IPV6 on the server being backed up but in this case Windows Server 2003 does not have IPV6.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

Open up a command prompt on those Win2K3 servers and type: vssadmin list writers

If any VSS writers are failed or retrying they're in error. A server restart normally fixes this, although Microsoft has the VSS Rollup patch you can look at applying should this happen again.

Thanks!

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2 REPLIES 2

CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

Open up a command prompt on those Win2K3 servers and type: vssadmin list writers

If any VSS writers are failed or retrying they're in error. A server restart normally fixes this, although Microsoft has the VSS Rollup patch you can look at applying should this happen again.

Thanks!

VJware
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified

Do ensure AOFO is enabled in the backup job and set to use the Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider.

Also, are the Win 2k3 servers updated with SP2 ?

A reboot will usually bring back the VSS writer to a stable state. Are there any errors / warnings related to VSS/volsnap in the event viewer ?