VSS Backups Failing: Resolve VSS backup issues on Windows servers

This may not be a text book method to resolve VSS backup issues but it seemed to have worked on few of the Windows 2003 servers we had issues while performing a Volume Shadow Copy backup. If you have issues while performing a shadow copy backup using NT backup utility, it might fail reporting:
   Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:0xffffffff

VSS backup mainly depends on the state of the VSS Writers on a particular Windows server.  To check the writer status, run the following command:

   VSSADMIN LIST WRITERS

This should display the writers along with its instance IDs and status like Delayed, Retrying, Failed, etc.  If this command executes successfully and returns nothing then it indicates the writers are not being picked up or recognized and hence VSS backups would fail.  If the command prompt appears to freeze and does not return any output, it indicates that there is some issue with the VSS writers on that server.

To troubleshoot this you could do the following on the Windows server:


If the backup still does not happen then perhaps you may want to troubleshoot further and post a note below to let us know how you resolved your issue regarding backing up a Volume Shadow Copy. However from my experience, the above tweak mostly does the trick.

#wyn