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Windows Server Backup Troubleshooting: Known Issues and Resolutions

  • Article

Applies to

This document summarizes the reported issues and resolutions of Server Backup feature for

  • Window Small Business Server 2011 Essentials,
  • Windows Home Server 2011 and
  • Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials.

In order to isolate and fix these issues, you need to access the event viewer and log file in your server.

Access Deny for RmMetaData

Symptom:

The server backup failed with incomplete instance in backup history. You will find Event ID 547 in event viewer under Application, Windows Logs. In the General info of this event, it shows a path of server backup log file in following format.

The backup operation that started at '‎2012‎-‎03‎-‎31T07:00:05.748719600Z' has encountered errors for the volume(s) 'F:'. Log of files not successfully backed up 'C:\Windows\Logs\WindowsServerBackup\Backup_Error-31-03-2012_02-00-05.log'.

Follow the above file path to open the server backup log, and it will have info like following:

Error in backup of F:\Extend\RmMetadata\TxfLog\ during write: Error [0x80070005] Access is denied.

Error in backup of F:\Extend\RmMetadata\TxfLog\TxfLog.blf during write: Error [0x80070005] Access is denied.

Root Cause:

This happened on NTFS format driver that has file level configuration for server backup only. $RmMetaData is for NTFS internal data which cannot be accessed by other process.

 

Resolution

You have two options to work around this issue.

  1. 1. You can change the server backup policy on the impacted volume as Block Level Backup, which means the whole volume should be selected for backup.
  2. 2. You can set the registry key to exclude these files during File Level Backup. These files are used for NTFS file system, and there is no harm to ignore them.

Go to  HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToBackup

 Adding a Multi-String Value named IgnoreNTFS with data \ $Extend\ /s under FilesNotToBackup.

 Restart the server.

 

VSS Failed to Create Shadow Copy

Symptom

The sever backup failed with incomplete / unsuccessful instance in backup history. You will find Event ID 519 under Application, Windows Logs in following format

The backup operation that started at '‎2012‎-‎04‎-‎08T07:00:03.915482900Z' has failed to back up volume(s) 'E:'. Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.

You will also find Event ID 36 under System, Windows Logs l in following format:

The shadow copies of volume E: were aborted because the shadow copy storage could not grow due to a user imposed limit.

These two events indicate the same identical volume caused the failure.

Root Cause

For server backup, it needs to create shadow copy on the source disk before backup. Creating shadow copy requires extra space. If the disk is run out of space or the shadow copy’s maximum allowed limitation is hit, shadow copy creation will fail.

 

Resolution:

Please check the source disk’s available size. If the available size is small (less than 10% of volume size), please free the disk by

  • Clean some unneeded data
  • Move data to another volume.
  • Delete existing shadow copy data.

When the source disk has more than 10% free space, please update the shadow copy maximum limitation to be a larger value. Recommend to be 10% space of total volume size.

Warning: If you set the shadow copy maximum size as unlimited, system will store up to 64 copies for each file you stored in the volume. This can provide the better protection of file’s version control but it will take up significant amount of disk space. Please ensure you have enough space before set it as unlimited or you can store the shadow copy data in another volume.  

For more info about shadow copy data management, please refer http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771305.

Backup Conflicts with Exchange Server

If you are backing up the volume which has Exchange Server installed, please refer the TechNet document for how to configure backup and restore for Exchange.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd876851.aspx

Factory Reset Failed with Error Code 0x80042431

Symptom

Serverrecovery.exe has crashed on server side and error code 0x80042431 is returned to client when doing factory reset.

Root cause

The disk status is offline and volume status shows as failed during the factory reset. This could happen if customer plugs and pulls hard disks and change their slot locations.

Workaround

The following steps may require a monitor, keyboard and mouse connected to the host server. You can follow below steps to clean up the disk.

Please note that clean disk will erase all the data in the target disk. Please make sure data in the disk has a backup before executing clean command.

  1. 1. Use Alt+F10 to launch another console window
  2. 2. Enter “diskpart”
  3. 3. Enter “List Disk”,
    • a. If there is any disk which status is offline, customer can select this by “Select disk X”, X is the number shown by “List Disk”
    • b. Enter “ONLINE DISK”.
  4. 4. Enter “List Volume”
    • a. If there is any volume which status is “failed”, customer can select this by “Select volume X”, X is the number shown by “List Volume”
    • b. Enter “Detail Volume” to know the volume’s disk number Y.
    • c. Enter “Select Disk Y”
    • d. Enter “CLEAN” to clean the disk.
  5. 5. Use the command in step 3 and step 4 again to make sure there is no unhealthy status.
  6. 6. Enter “Exit” to exit diskpart./li>
  7. 7.7. Continue with the server factory reset process.

Another Backup is in Progress

Symptom:

The server backup failed with unsuccessful instance in backup history. You will find Event ID 518strong> in event viewer under Application, Windows Logs.

You will find similar errors in the event log as following logs.

ThThe backup operation that started at '‎2012‎-‎03‎-‎31T17:00:07.104757000Z' has failed because another backup or recovery operation is in progress. Please stop the conflicting operation, and then rerun the backup operation.

Root Cause

The sever backup will be kicked off at the scheduled time in backup policy. When there is the other process running server backup / recovery, the new process will fail.

This is by design and you can ignore this issue. Once the existing backup/recovery process finishes, the new backup process should be run without this issue.p>

 

Additional Notes for Server Backup

  1. Generic workaround of server backup failure is to reconfigure server backup policy. It can solve some issues caused by environment change such as volume GUID change.
  2. For the backup performance, please note:
    • Block level backup has better performance than file level backup. Block level backup means you select to back up the whole volume during creating the backup policy.
    • If a backup failed, the subsequent backup will cost more time. The subsequent backup will be a full backup and it will also try to prune the existing backup. So, it will cost much more time for a backup subsequent to a failed backup.
  3. For the backup space management, Server backup will reclaim a small portion of existing backups when it needs new space. Usually, on the dashboard, you will get an alert notifying that backup disk has less than 10% free space. Server backup will delete the existing backups automatically for space. You can ignore the alert and rely on the server to delete these backups if you don’t want to keep all. We have also updated the alert UI in UR3 to be clearer on the message. If you want to manually manage the space, you can refer to this blog for further background and details:
  4. http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2011/03/14/windows-server-backup-automatic-disk-usage-management.aspx