I've been having trouble getting good backups on a Windows 2003 server. It's starting to look like the boot drive is just too busy. I keep getting errors saying:
AOFO: Initialization failure on: "C:". Advanced Open File Option used: Symantec Volume Snapshot Provider (VSP).
AOFO: Unable to get minimum quiet time for physical volumes. Reduce the activity on these volumes, or wait and run the backup when there is less activity on the volumes.
The system does do a fair amount (but it's a small site, totally idle at night): it's a domain controller, file/print server, Exchange server, SQL server, WSUS server and virtual machine server. I have Symantec Enterprise installed, and it runs SMS for Exchange. The server has two 3.4GHz (single core) Xeons and 6GB of RAM.
I've tried using Sysinternals' Filemon and Regmon to track this down. And I have to agree, it seems fairly rare that the system will go more than 5 seconds without _some_ disk write activity on C:. It's either Exchange, SQL, some log or event log, registry updates, or whatever. SMS for Exchange seems to cause a lot of registry activity. I've tried a command to stop/start WSUS. But does it make sense to shut down Exchange and SQL as well? Besides, if I understand properly, the snapshot provide tells those to pause during the snapshot. There aren't really any third party apps I can shut down.
At this point, I have my backups split 4 ways:
1. C:, shadow copy and info store
2. The other data drives
3. SQL
4. Exchange
Everything works but the first.
One thing I wonder: should I manually, explicitly exclude the SQL and Exchange data areas? I hate doing that, because every manual exclusion is one more place to make a mistake and accidently exclude something important. I've done that, it cost me a lot, and I don't care to repeat it. And BE doesn't exactly provide much for backup content auditing.
Oh, I do have AOFO set for automatic selection and single-volume snapshots, and the quescent timer is already reduced to 4 seconds.
What am I doing wrong?