We Got Served

Welcome to Dave Marchant, who not only looks after reader support as part of the moderation team at WGS Forums, but will be helping out here on the site with features and reviews! Over to Dave….

Have backup issues been getting you down? Backup is one of the most popular areas of the WGS Forums and for most users, the problem is often restricted to just one or two of their PCss. How do you get that problem PC backing up when you know the process is working fine on your other systems?

The good news is there are a few straightforward steps you can take to eliminate the most common causes of PC backup failure. Once these have been exhausted, by all means come over to the Forums and share your issue to the rest of the community. If you explain you have gone through the steps below, you will be helping us get you to the heart of your problems more quickly.

1. Does the backup work if you do it manually rather than waiting for the automatic backup to kick in? If so, that is not going to be resolved by the suggestions here as it is probably your PC not waking up as you expect it to. Maybe we can get to those sort of issues at a later date – at least you can get a manual backup to keep your data safe for the moment.

2. If you cannot get a backup to complete or even start, firstly uninstall and reinstall the connector. Then try a manual backup. This simple step reinstalls the backup program (which is run entirely from the PC) and gets over quite a few issues.

3. If the reinstallation doesn’t get you any further forward, the next step is to check your disk(s) for errors. This is also the first step to take if you get one drive backing up and another failing on the same PC. You can do this through Windows Explorer by right-clicking on the drive, selecting Properties and going to the Tools tab

Run the Error Checking and select both ‘Automatically fix file system errors’ and ‘Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors’. The alternative to this is to drop to a command prompt and run ‘Chkdsk C: /F /R’ (substitute the C: for alternative drives if needed). Once done, reboot and try your backup again.

4. Users are often prompted to carry out Chkdsk by the backup software since this is a common recognised problem. However, there are other causes where this suggestion is presented but does not resolve the issue. These are normally accompanied by Volume Snapshot errors either advised in a dialog box, or reported in the Event Log. Volume Snapshots are used not only by WHS Backups but by most other leading disk imaging and backup software when handling NTFS disk volumes. It allows a backup to be taken of a point in time even though there is disk activity going on during the backup process. That disk activity is written to a holding area until the backup completes and then everything else brought together (this is a bit of a simplistic description). Unless the Volume Snapshot can be taken, the backup cannot commence. Causes for failure can be through other backup or imaging software being on the system. Remove them (it could be Ghost, Acronis or any other backup or disk imaging programs), reboot and try again.

5. Finally, it may be that the Volume Snapshot program within Windows is not functioning. Given the amount of traffic on various forums relating to all variants of Windows since Windows 2000 on this subject it is surprising there are not more simple tools around to fix it. The first thing to do is make sure the Service is not disabled. In Control Panel, go to Administrative Tools and open Services. Find Make sure the Volume Shadow Copy service is set to Manual (i.e. not Disabled).

The last step is to try and repair the Volume Shadow Copy system. There is not a definitive Microsoft Tech Bulletin that covers workstation OS’s, However, this is taken from KB940032 which is for Server 2003 and should relate closely to XP and Vista (but you may get the odd error for some of the commands to say the dll does not exist, which you can ignore).

Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.

Type the following commands at a command prompt. Press ENTER after you type each command.

cd /d %windir%\system32

Net stop vss
Net stop swprv
regsvr32 ole32.dll
regsvr32 oleaut32.dll
regsvr32 vss_ps.dll
vssvc /register
regsvr32 /i swprv.dll
regsvr32 /i eventcls.dll
regsvr32 es.dll
regsvr32 stdprov.dll
regsvr32 vssui.dll
regsvr32 msxml.dll
regsvr32 msxml3.dll
regsvr32 msxml4.dll
Net start swprv
Net start vss

Perform a backup operation to verify that the issue is resolved.

This will hopefully resolve a number of the more common backup issues without resorting to a reinstall of the PC’s OS. One cause of backup failures reported some time ago for which a reinstall was about the only fix was when a partition had been converted from FAT32 to NTFS. This seems to be a far less common process to go through now and whether it is that, or improvements in the WHS backup, this cause seems to have more or less disappeared.