Windows Server Backup 2012 Fails on "preparing the backup image"

Question

I have a couple of Windows Server 2012 VM's I need to backup. Everything works fine on all but one machine.

No matter where I choose to store the backup, it fails almost immediately with:

Backup failed to complete. There was a failure in preparing the backup image of one of the volumes in the backup set. Detailed error: The specified backup disk cannot be found.

This happens if I use an attached iSCSI volume, or for testing I tried a share to a 2008R2 server. The "WindowsImageBackup" folder structure appears on the backup target.

I the event log I get:

The backup operation that started at '‎2013‎-‎05‎-‎09T16:44:47.343260900Z' has failed with following error code '0x807800C5' (There was a failure in preparing the backup image of one of the volumes in the backup set.). Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.

And in the C:\Windows\logs\WindowsServerBackup error log I see:

Backup of volume \?\Volume{ea169114-77ab-11e2-93e7-806e6f6e6963}\ has failed. The specified backup disk cannot be found.

Another guest VM with the exact same backup settings works perfectly fine. The only difference is this machine is a domain controller and the other is an Exchange 2010 server.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Adding vssadmin list writers output:

vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool (C) Copyright 2001-2012 Microsoft Corp.

Writer name: 'Task Scheduler Writer' Writer Id: {d61d61c8-d73a-4eee-8cdd-f6f9786b7124} Writer Instance Id: {1bddd48e-5052-49db-9b07-b96f96727e6b} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'VSS Metadata Store Writer' Writer Id: {75dfb225-e2e4-4d39-9ac9-ffaff65ddf06} Writer Instance Id: {088e7a7d-09a8-4cc6-a609-ad90e75ddc93} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'Performance Counters Writer' Writer Id: {0bada1de-01a9-4625-8278-69e735f39dd2} Writer Instance Id: {f0086dda-9efc-47c5-8eb6-a944c3d09381} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'System Writer' Writer Id: {e8132975-6f93-4464-a53e-1050253ae220} Writer Instance Id: {e8b9d601-fa02-4d94-8b2c-8621a202ef72} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'ASR Writer' Writer Id: {be000cbe-11fe-4426-9c58-531aa6355fc4} Writer Instance Id: {1c248721-b8d1-47d9-aa80-5d61bbb8b52d} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'Shadow Copy Optimization Writer' Writer Id: {4dc3bdd4-ab48-4d07-adb0-3bee2926fd7f} Writer Instance Id: {9f8b055f-63a6-4cb3-b17e-3c9a303af661} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'FRS Writer' Writer Id: {d76f5a28-3092-4589-ba48-2958fb88ce29} Writer Instance Id: {b50f047c-7c30-4738-b40c-f4ea3b0cb440} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'COM+ REGDB Writer' Writer Id: {542da469-d3e1-473c-9f4f-7847f01fc64f} Writer Instance Id: {a13bb452-9d7b-4229-8b27-4abf21e570a1} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'Registry Writer' Writer Id: {afbab4a2-367d-4d15-a586-71dbb18f8485} Writer Instance Id: {636da5ab-dcc2-4a74-b583-2754f44718de} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'BITS Writer' Writer Id: {4969d978-be47-48b0-b100-f328f07ac1e0} Writer Instance Id: {d79fd218-5189-4a69-b229-948801bdff7b} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'NTDS' Writer Id: {b2014c9e-8711-4c5c-a5a9-3cf384484757} Writer Instance Id: {ff77a651-f07c-4a9e-9104-9d8f58fd8cd2} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'WMI Writer' Writer Id: {a6ad56c2-b509-4e6c-bb19-49d8f43532f0} Writer Instance Id: {3a00c32e-7d67-43e7-8b38-5398241f9b11} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Writer name: 'Certificate Authority' Writer Id: {6f5b15b5-da24-4d88-b737-63063e3a1f86} Writer Instance Id: {5e5ed7ba-f8b4-4e53-953d-32175fcd94ef} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error

Solution 1

I installed today's updates and rebooted and it now appears to be working. Something must have just been in a strange state. Thanks for the replies.

Solution 2

Obviously @Tamerz problem has been resolved but the solution doesn't help other people since it just started working.

I see many people struggling with this same problem and I found several things that may be helpful for others.

If you look in Application Log of the Event View you will find entries with the backup failures. This will mention an error code which you can look up in this TechNet article. The article has some trouble shooting tips but they are largely the same for all error codes. However, knowing the underlying error codes gives you another search term for more fruitful searches.

In my case I was trying to backup to a network share and according to this site http://mikebeach.org/2013/01/24/windows-8-error-code-0x807800c5-during-windows-7-file-recovery-backup/ Windows 8 (and Server 2012) do not support backing up an image file to any kind of NAS device (UNIX, Linux) . Internally the program gives an error that the NAS device has an incompatible sector mapping type.

The work around I found for this was to create a VHD on a file share of the NAS device and then use Disk Manager to mount the VHD. Then I could use the VHD as a dedicated backup disk. I tried first with a Dynamically Expanding VHD but got a missing sector error of some type. Creating a Fixed Size VHD worked.

Hopefully someone else will find this useful.

Solution 3

Thought I would share as well that if your trying to do a backup to a Synology NAS, and you do something clever like Enabling the options on the share to hide from network neighborhood the backup will fail. Once I turned that option to HIDE off (unchecked), the backup worked fine.

Comments

[kralyk]

can you verify that the VSS writers are fine? "vssadmin list writers" on the problem server.

[Tamerz]

There are 13 writers listed and all say "No error".

[Tamerz]

I have not tried an external drive (other than iSCSI of course). I don't currently have physical access to the machine, but it is something I can arrange. It is running Trend Micro, but so is the other machine that works fine. Just to be safe I just disabled it and tried again with no success. The backup has never worked, this is a brand new install. I had not seen that link, but it doesn't seem to apply here. I am using a completely empty folder/drive to back up to.

[Chris Powell]

I had a similar problem a while ago. The problem ended up being that WSB cannot backup to or from a drive that doesn't have 512 byte or 512e byte sectors.

[chicks]

Welcome to ServerFault. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/… Can you make your answer stand on its own?