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TechGuy_007Flag for United States of America

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Windows Server Backup Fails "System Cannot Find File Specified"

Server 2008 R2 Standard SP1
DC, Exchange, DNS, DHCP

A few weeks ago my local backups began to fail on my DC. The error thrown is simply "The system cannot find the file specified" on my data partition. Windows partition, System Reserved partition both back up fine, most of the data drive backs up fine but about 75% of the way through it seems to fail.
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rindi
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Run a chkdsk /f /r on the partition that fails (the server will probably need to reboot to do this, and depending on the size of the partition and the number of errors to fix, this can take a long time, so do this during "off" hours).
If it does not show a specific file which it refers to then running CHKDSK on that system is recommended.
If CHKDSK does not fix the problem then try to take backup to different storage, sometime MS Backup behaves this way if storage has write/read issues.
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Will try CHKDSK tonight and post results. Thank you for the help!
Chkdsk did not help, I reinstalled WSB yesterday and the backup did complete successfully last night. I will keep an eye on it for a few days and close this if reinstalling the  WSB feature ends up being the fix.
So the reinstalling should normally clean up the logs and events plus generate new GUID storage. Did you try simply point it to different storage? That could have helped as well.
Frankly speaking I would recommend you using third party backup solution. They are more convenient and reliable than WSB. Yes, they cost money but at the end you understand that third party solution is worth of its price.
Symantec, Paragon, Acronis, Shadow Protect, Veeam etc.
So, after reinstalling, the backups worked for 4 days then failed again with the same error last night. I'm running chkdsk on the destination drives now. I'm already using two different destination drives that are switched each day, so I don't think it's an issue with those. Would like to avoid a 3rd party solution if possible, but the option is on the table.
Try cleaning up the logs and events of WBS.
Just inside event viewer? I did that today, will post results tomorrow.
Yes, the last result information is gathered by WSB from Event Viewer. Sounds lame - but it is so. I have had this experience where I had to clean up WSB Events in Event Viewer - Applications - Backup (if I remember it correctly now).
Yep, backup successful last night. So it's the logs in Event Viewer causing issues? Will that one cleanup do the trick, or will I have to do this as a matter of routine? Also - thank you for the help!
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noxcho
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Did the issue reoccur?
Gave up - been using Veeam for weeks with no issue. Working on switching all of my servers over now. WSB seemed to work so well for years; lately I've been having issues with it across many environments - mostly on 2008 / 2011 machines.
Unfortunately for Microsoft the WSB is not the prio 1 in development.