Backup Failed

Perhaps a group policy setting has been changed, group membership changed, or a group removed, or a password changed. It sounds like the result of an intentional change made to one of the groups or group policies that affected your backups. Review any recent changes and look through the event logs for recent changes, especially to any account related to the SharePoint Foundation, which is the spsearch origin.

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2537096

No changes have been made.
I did however after the error occurred follow a link in the Web that said re-do the share point using the wizard, and which I did but it has made no difference

Check your group policy settings and make sure the accounts for Sharepoint exist - specifically spsearch - and that they have permissions to run the required procedure. Also make sure the password has not changed, SharePoint is not good at automatically updating this information to where it needs to go.

The problem is with the sharepoint writer as I can see in your log provided..

Try to run the SBS sharepoint wizard.

This usually fixes the problem.

I did run the sharepoint wizard, and it made no difference.
Sorry to sound stupid but who is spsearch and what would his password be?

All right. Spsearch is a component for Sharepoint.

What type of backup are you running system state or a image backup?

I am using the backup as shown in the windows sbs 2011.standard consle. I accepted all the defaults for a full backup and it has been working fine untill the last few days. The setting says "VSS Full Backup"

You'll need to set up the spsearch account using the same password it originally was installed with the first time the Sharepoint setup was run and give it at least enough privilege to run the backup including the VSS operations or maybe just make sure the password stored in your backup software matches the spsearch software as it controls the Sharepoint installation, which includes some tie to the VSS operation.

Went to Sharepiont2010 Central Admin - security
Central Admin=Site settings-people and groups - farma administrators
and added a user called Sharepiont Search Service Account (SPsearch)
but could not find anywere for a password.

Ran backup and ist still failed withe the same message

If that's the case then it may be that you have performed a Windows update or installed a service pack for SharePoint which affected the services. See the following post for a possible solution to this known "bug."

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/05/24/you-must-manually-run-psconfig-after-installing-sharepoint-2010-patches.aspx

To quote (partially):

In order to update the SharePoint databases, you must manually run the PSconfig utility. To run the utility:

1. Open an Administrative command prompt.
2. Change directory to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN
3. Run PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

Note: The Companyweb site will be inaccessible while the command is running. It is best to run the command after business hours. The amount of time the command takes to run will vary on the size of the database and the speed of the machine. On a reference machine with 8 logical processors, 32GB of RAM and a 2GB content database, the command took approximately 5 minutes to execute.

The SharePoint configuration wizard will launch and perform the configuration tasks. When the command is finished, you should see the following message:

Successfully completed the SharePoint Products configuration.
Total number of configuration settings run: 6
Total number of successful configuration settings: 6
Total number of unsuccessful configuration settings: 0
Successfully stopped the configuration of SharePoint Products.
Configuration of the SharePoint Products has succeeded.

For additional information on SharePoint Foundation 2010 patches see the following TechNet site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff806326.aspx

Done that, still the same problem!

Run the Best Practices Analyzers on your server and see if that gives us any additional clues.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg609307(WS.10).aspx

I am not sure if I have done this correctly but I have run the BPA and got aresult of
non-compliant =0
compliant =2

We use VPN and Outlook Web access
if these are not reliant on sharepoint which we do not use can we delete sharepiont and get the full backup to work?

Is the account spsearch a member of either the local administrators or backup operators group? Make sure it is listed in one of these two groups as a member.

Spsearch  only exists in the sharepiont central admin -   site settings - people and groups - farm administrators.
He does not exist in the active directory users
Should he be added here?

If you launch Active Directory Users and Computers (under Administrative Tools) you should see SharePoint Search Service Account using spsearch@domain.com as an email address, along with SharePoint Farm Account using spfarm@domain.com. You will find it under My Business, Users, SBUsers.

Have added both as administrators and backup operators and still the backup failed.other than the 2 event messages immidetatley after running the back up I noticed this message
about 15 minutes later
----------------------------------------------
Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Failed resolving account spsearch with status 1376. Check connection to domain controller and VssAccessControl registry key.

Operation:
   Initializing Writer

Context:
   Writer Class Id: {afbab4a2-367d-4d15-a586-71dbb18f8485}
   Writer Name: Registry Writer

Error-specific details:
   Error: NetLocalGroupGetMemebers(spsearch), 0x80070560, The specified local group does not exist.

I am slow to recommend directly editing the registry. However, that is the direction some of my research is pointing at, so do this at your own risk - editing the registry always involves risk, and this is amplified by the fact that we are dealing with a backup failing issue, meaning you may not be able to fully restore from backup.

[With that said, one method to backup most servers - the slow and expensive way - is to purchase one or more hard drive cloning devices and an equal number of hard drives and simply clone each server hard drive to a new drive, just in case anything goes wrong. Make sure to put the originals back in to avoid having to recreate RAID array information, and put each disk back on the same controller / cable it came from.]

The registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS\VssAccessControl
will likely list two or three accounts that have to do with the VSS access control, as indicated in the name.

Find the offending registry entry (spsearch) if it exists in this key and change the value to 0.
Launch Services under Administrative Tools and find the Volume Shadow Service. Stop and restart this service.
Try the backup again.

This is not a well-documented approach and there may be other implications, so watch for anything else which appears as an indication of other problems and be prepared to change this setting back to where it was.

I reset spsearch to 0 in the registry.
The only Volume Shadow thing I could find in the Services was:
Volume Shadow Copy
Status=started
startup type= manual

I restarted this and ran the backup I am afraid it failed again!

Check your event viewer to see if it is still failing with the same exact message or if it changed the reason why.

It is identical to the orginal message:

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Failed resolving account spsearch with status 1376. Check connection to domain controller and VssAccessControl registry key.

Operation:
   Gathering Writer Data
   Executing Asynchronous Operation

Context:
   Execution Context: Requestor
   Current State: GatherWriterMetadata

Error-specific details:
   Error: NetLocalGroupGetMemebers(spsearch), 0x80070560, The specified local group does not exist.

the backup failed at  16.35hrs
with this message:
The backup operation that started at '¿2012¿-¿08¿-¿20T15:33:32.889000000Z' has failed because the Volume Shadow Copy Service operation to create a shadow copy of the volumes being backed up failed with following error code '2155348129'. Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.

And at 16.45hrs (10minutes later)
This message appeared
Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Failed resolving account spsearch with status 1376. Check connection to domain controller and VssAccessControl registry key.

Operation:
   Initializing Writer

Context:
   Writer Class Id: {4dc3bdd4-ab48-4d07-adb0-3bee2926fd7f}
   Writer Name: Shadow Copy Optimization Writer

Error-specific details:
   Error: NetLocalGroupGetMemebers(spsearch), 0x80070560, The specified local group does not exist.

Try the command to check to see if your database needs to be upgraded.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/07/06/potential-issues-after-installing-sharepoint-foundation-2010-sp1.aspx

•Launch an elevated (Run as Administrator) SharePoint 2010 Management shell from start, All Programs, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products, SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.
•Once the shell opens, type the following command followed by enter:
(get-spserver $env:computername).NeedsUpgrade

If the result is "true" then you need to perform the upgrade again. (Perhaps you will also need to install SharePoint SP1 again first.)

In order to update the SharePoint databases, you must manually run the PSconfig utility. To run the utility:

1. Open an Administrative command prompt.
2. Change directory to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN
3. Run PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

The result is false!

Okay, back to the registry - can you change the value to 0 for all entries except the NetworkService account? Were there more than spsearch and NetworkService? Remember to restart the volume shadow copy service after and then try the backup again. The key was HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS\VssAccessControl

No luck that did not work

We have tried everything that I can come up with short of removing SharePoint along with everything associated with it, and resinstalling it from scratch. That is beyond my realm to help you with. My advice is to repost your question to the list, and include these things you and I have tried. Experts are sometimes reluctant to add answers to a thread when there are this many (27) entries, so if you post a fresh thread I won't jump in, and somebody else may have some fresh ideas. I wish you the best of luck!

Just one last question could i not just removethe sharepiont as we do not use it?

SharePoint Foundation is a standalone product that can be downloaded for free and installed even on a workstation, so in theory - of course you could simply remove it. However, I have seen problems in SharePoint cause problems in remote access, email, backups and other places - so be warned. Removing it may not solve your problem, and may create others. However - removing it and reinstalling it may help as well - in theory. As Yogi Berra once said, "In theory, things work the same in theory as they do in practice. In practice, however, they don't."

Thank you for all your help it was very kind of you to give so much time

Sam

You're welcome, Sam. I'm glad to try to help. I wish we had solved it, but not all things are easy - that's why places like this even exist.

Just another note with regard to this problem

If I go to SERVICES and disable: SQL Server VSS Writer
The backup runs correctly.

In SERVICES there are 5 SQL items working(Started)  I turned them off on by one and found that the backup failed untill the last one SQL Server VSS Writer was turned off then the backup worked!

Solution not found yet, but help was greatly appreciated