I troubleshot a failed backup job Today. The log shows it is a VSS relavent error.
We use Symantec backup exec to backup some files on a Windows server. And the job is configured to use ‘Microsoft software shadow copy provider’ as the VSS provider. While in the Windows server, I found there are two VSS providers – ‘hpEVA VSS hardware provider’ and ‘Microsoft software shadow copy provider’ by running the command ‘vssadmin list providers’.
Per Microsoft, the volume shadow copy service always tries to start the provider in this order: Hardware provider –> Software provider –> System provider. So I suspect this failure might be caused by the inconsistent settings of the VSS provider in the two systems.
As the hardware VSS provider is currently used for some other purpose in the Windows server, I am not able to remove it to verify that. But this is definitely what you should check first when there is a VSS relavent issue.
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