Physical Server Backups Fail

[SJV_Mike]

The backup od all my physical servers will not run. The backup os my NetApp SAN is working perfectly. All of the backup jobs stop with the same message:

"The job failed with the following error: The resource could not be backed up because an error occurred while connecting to the Agent for Windows. The correct version of the Agent for Windows must be running on the target computer."

We are backing up to external 3.0 USB Drives at this time.

We have removed the local agents then pushed them out again but this did nothing for us. I ahve run the update from the backup exec server but it says we have the newest versions. All of the services appear to be running both on all servers.

Sorry this is probably a basic issue I am just missing something, this is a new product to me so I am trying to make it work before I look into others.

[Kunal_Mudliyar1]

Can you go to the server that you are bakcingup

Open the command prompt

type vssadmin list writers

See if any writer has crashed

[SJV_Mike]

Thats interesting, I as the domain admin don't have rights to the VSS command line, what the heck is higher than domain admin? Ugg this project is really burning out my few remaining brain cells.

[Kunal_Mudliyar1]

Run the command prompt as an administrator

[SJV_Mike]

Good call, WMI is in failed state 7 / time out. I restarted the server after that didn't change it I restarted the associated services and still reporting same error.

[Kunal_Mudliyar1]

Looks like you got some VSS corruption going on which is failing your system state backup.

This server on which the system state is failing is it Windows 2003 or Windows 2008?

Check the event viewer , there will be a lot of Microsoft Kbs on these event ids.

[SJV_Mike]

2008 R2

[SJV_Mike]

To add to the confusion I just added two brand new physical servers with 2008 R2 and did one time system state backups and it ran perfectly.

[Kunal_Mudliyar1]

The VSS issue lies with the server that failed and not the other servers of Backup Exec server so it will not affect any other backup apart from the server on which the writers fail

Can you install the problem Windows 2008 R2 server with the laters MS patches

Its out of scope of this forum to fix the VSS related writer issues,

You might want to look into Microsoft documentation to fix the VSS errors.