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dankyle67

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Barracuda backup failing on windows 2012 server with Freeze and Thaw error

Hi, for quite some time now one of our windows 2012 servers fails on the daily backup job on our barracuda device.  The error that comes up states "error during backup initialization: the writer's timeout expired between the Freeze and Thaw events."  Ive spoken to barracuda support already 4 times and each time they give me a different answer and one of them works like 80% of the time.  I stop and start both the com+ event and volume shadow copy services and once i do this and run a manual backup of that server it works.  I was also told by barracuda that there is a microsoft hotfix for this on one of the updates but when i went to install that update, a message came up stating that the system already has this update installed.  Any ideas on how to solve this issue?  Thanks.
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Adam Brown
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You may need to increase the VSS timeout window. https://support.solarwindsmsp.com/kb/solarwinds_backup/Error-VSS-error-0x800423f2-The-writer-s-timeout-expired-between-the-Freeze-and-Thaw-events?q=VSS%20error%200x800423f2 explains how to do this. This is not so much an error in Barracuda's backup software (not specifically at least), but with the VSS service itself. It could be caused by Barracuda's software, but their software utilizes VSS like every other backup solution for Windows, it just may be doing so in a way that causes this error to show up. This probably is related to the hotfix the support guys mentioned, but it's likely these settings still need to be adjusted.

Another possible cause would be if there are multiple backup jobs running at the same time on the computer. Check to see if the Barracuda software is running multiple backups per day, then you should see how long the backups take. If the time backups take to complete exceeds the time between backups running, put more space between the backups so there is sufficient time for job completion.
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dankyle67

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That sounds good I will take a look at the link. Your suggestion about spacing out the backups so they don’t run at the same time makes sense but I’ve run that one particular backup job manually without the other jobs running and yet many times the same error comes up. Like I mentioned, stopping and starting the vss service works but not all the time. What I did do this morning was after the manual job failed, I created a new test job which only backed up a small folder on that same server and it ran successfully.
Sorry was caught up with more pressing issue at work but i did make the changes to the registry on the server to increase the timeout interval
related to the volume shadow copy and it still didnt work so what i did was to make the backup job run first with a 3hr space before the other servers and it still failed.  Then i changed the backup schedule to run every other nite instead of daily and it failed one nite but succeeded just last nite so there's no consistency to it.  Any other ideas?  thanks
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