Category: Troubleshooting

VSS Error: Couldn’t take snapshot. The shadow copy provider had an unexpected error while trying to process the specified operation

Common VSS Related Errors:

0x800423f4: The writer experienced a non-transient error.

0x8004230f: The shadow copy provider had an unexpected error while trying to process the specified operation.

0x80042336: The writer experienced a partial failure. Check the component level error state for more information.

  1. Check the VSS writers' status in an elevated command prompt. If any writer is in a failed state, you may need to restart the service or, reboot the system.
    From an elevated command prompt or PowerShell run:
vssadmin list writers

This will provide an list of all VSS writers on your PC. You want to check the Last Error and State items.

  1. The value of Last Error should always be No Error, if the status is different you have a problem writer.
  2. The value of State should be show [1] Stable.
  3. A simple reboot of the PC may resolve this problem. If the issue continues after a reboot, it could indicate a larger issue within the PC.
  1. Check for disk space issues: Ensure that there's enough free disk space on the volumes being backed up and the volume where the shadow copies are stored.
  2. Check that you have  the VSS writers installed and working.
    If any provider is causing an issue, try reinstalling or updating the provider.
    From an elevated command prompt or PowerShell run:
vssadmin list providers


If you have any VSS providers listed other than Microsoft, you should disable them.

  1. Shadow storage on the source drives is not configured or not large enough. The shadow storage size can be checked and manually changed through an elevated command prompt or PowerShell:

To check the current shadow storage limits:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

To change the shadow storage limit:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=X: /On=X: /Maxsize=XX%

Example Usages:
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=900MB
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=D: /MaxSize=UNBOUNDED
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=20%

  1. Check the Windows Event Logs for error messages or warnings that might be helpful. You can use the Windows Event Viewer or we have provided a PowerShell command below.
    This command will filter events with the source "VSS" or "VolSnap" and displays those with a level of 'Error' or 'Warning':
Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{LogName='System'; ProviderName=@('VSS', 'VolSnap'); Level=@(2,3)} | Format-Table TimeCreated, ProviderName, Id, LevelDisplayName, Message -AutoSize
  • Microsoft's VSS is only able to perform one snapshot at a time. If a snapshot is already in progress when your backup job starts, then the backup job could fail. Stopping and restarting the Volume Shadow Copy service can resolve this problem. To do this, open an elevated command prompt or PowerShell window and run the following commands:
net stop vss
net start vss


If restarting the VSS service with the 'net stop vss & net start vss' shown above does not resolve the issue, a server reboot has also been known to clean up the snapshot manager correctly.

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How to Locate EFS Encrypted Files and Disable EFS

On occasion, an EFS certificate may be issued to your domain user account. You may never have even knowingly used EFS, but if a certificate has been issued there are usually some EFS encrypted files on the system drive.

Encrypting File System is a technology that allows users to encrypt files, EFS was introduced in Windows long before BitLocker and is typically no longer in use. EFS is sometimes enabled by default, in this situation users can self-encrypt files without having implemented procedures that will allow them to recover the files when needed.

Locating EFS Encrypted Files

Most users have never knowingly used EFS and do not know where these EFS encrypted files are located.

Fortunately, there is a utility included with Windows that can help us locate these files. From an elevated command prompted you need to run the following command.

To easily open the Command Prompt with admin privileges. Press Windows+R to open the “Run” box. Type “cmd” into the box and then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to run the command as an administrator.

Open Command Prompted with Admin Privlages

Ctrl+Shift+Enter to run the command as an administrator

In your command window, move to the root of your system drive.

Type the command

cd\

Once you are at C:\ you can run the cipher utility with the following command.

cipher /u /n /h

This command will generate a list of all of the EFS encrypted files. The search process is recursive so it will look through sub-directories as well. We are including the /n switch to prevent cipher from triggering an update on the file which means that it will not try to use or renew the EFS certificate on the file. This is important where you may not have permissions to currently access the files but only traverse directory permissions.

search_efs_files

When the process is complete, Cipher will display a list of encrypted files with their locations.

If there are no files listed as shown in the example above, you do not have any EFS encrypted files on your system drive.

Disable EFS via Group Policy

If you want to prevent any new EFS encrypted files from appearing, you can easily do this with Group Policy editor.

Press Windows+R to open the “Run” box. Type “gpedit.msc” and press enter.

Run group policy editor

In the Group Policy Editor navigate to

Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Public Key Policies

Right-click on the Encrypting File System folder in the left side navigation area. Select Properties and In the EFS Properties window choose "Don't allow", Click OK. This will disable the ability for users to use EFS.

How to disable EFS Encryption

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OneDrive error “The tag present in the reparse point buffer is invalid”

This warning may appear if you are using the OneDrive Files On-demand feature. If you have chosen to backup the contents of your OneDrive folder, the backup client may be trying to backup placeholder junction files/folder kept by the On-demand feature.

The message: "The tag present in the reparse point buffer is invalid"

Indicates that some of those junction files are likely in a damaged state, this could happen if OneDrive had crashed or terminated improperly at some point.

Usually this can be fixed by running chkdsk.exe from an elevated command prompt by running 'chkdsk c: /f'.

Be aware that running this repair may require a system reboot.

You may also want to see this article to disable the OneDrive Files On-demand feature so that you can backup files stored on OneDrive.

https://eazybackup.com/knowledge-base/error-access-to-the-cloud-file-is-denied-backing-up-onedrive/

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VSS Error – Device is not ready

The error message indicating "device is not ready" is a VSS snapshot error.

It indicates that the VSS snapshot may have been destroyed while the backup was in progress. VSS snapshots can be destroyed manually by malware, or by ‘cleanup’ type programs. They can also be destroyed if the device is low on disc space, and the device uses space in the ‘shadow’ area where the snapshot is being put together.

Suggested solutions are:

- Check if other software is requesting a VSS snapshot operation at the same time as eazyBackup's request for a VSS snapshot.
- Run the backup again to see if the problem still persists - the issue may have been temporary.
- Check the disk space on the device - low disk space is the most cause and is outside of eazyBackup control.

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Error backing up item exit status 3 Couldn’t create virtual device set: Unknown error 0x80770005

This error might be caused if the user account running the backup is not included in the Security Setting for the "Create global objects" in the "User Rights Assignment" of the Local Security Policy.

In Control Panel, under Administrative Tools, open the Local Security Policy editor and expand ‘Local Polices’ -> 'User Rights Assignment' locate 'Create global objects'. Ensure that the group and or user performing the backup is within the Security Setting for the 'Create global objects' field. Add the user/group to this policy if they are not a member.

You may also want to change the backup service to run as a privileged user. Open Run ->  services.msc, locate eazyBackup delegate and elevator services. Stop both services, change the login user to your local Administrator account or account with sufficient privileges and restart both services.

Ensure the account running the backup service (eazyBackup delegate and elevator service) also belongs to the 'Create global objects listed above.

 

 

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Diagnosing Slow Backup Jobs

There are many possible reasons why a backup job might be slow.

Internet Bandwidth

  • Check the speed of your internet connection, fast.com is a popular website that will test your transfer rates. Your upload bandwidth will be the limiting factor in how quickly your can transfer data to your cloud storage vault.

Recent changes

Did the issue suddenly start happening, at a certain time?

  • New software
    • Any recently-installed software might change the performance profile of the customer's PC.
    • On Windows, check in "Programs And Features" and sort by Date to see any recently-installed software

PC performance

Do you have multiple computers experiencing the issue, or just a single PC? This helps determine whether the issue is related to a particular computer or whether the issue is related to the environment.

  • Antivirus
    • Many antivirus programs will scan each file as eazyBackup reads them, including but not limited to ESET NOD32 and Windows Defender.
    • Does it help to exclude eazyBackup backup-tool.exe program in the antivirus software?
      • v19.3.13 and later automatically does this for Windows Defender.
    • Does the antivirus process show as having high usage in Task Manager when the backup is running?
  • Use of slow settings
    • Ensure the "Limit backup to use only 1 disk thread" option is not enabled
    • Ensure the "speed limit" option is not enabled
    • Ensure the "Prefer temporary files instead of RAM (slower)" option is not enabled
    • Toggle the "Rescan unchanged files" option, to see if it increases- or decreases- performance
  • RAM usage
    • With large data sets, there are many different data chunks that may be deduplicated against. eazyBackup can use a few GB of RAM to hold all the indexes for deduplication. If the local PC is low on RAM, it may use the swapfile / pagefile, which can significantly reduce performance.
  • CPU usage
    • eazyBackup compresses and encrypts all data before upload. On weak CPUs this may cause high CPU usage. The CPU usage may become a bottleneck.

Storage performance

  • Avoid backing up files from a network share
    • If you are backing up files from a network location, eazyBackup must make many network roundtrips to access the data. It may be substantially faster to install eazyBackup on the network device instead.
  • Backup source is a single-queue block device
    • eazyBackup issues many requests to the source disk in parallel. To avoid negatively affecting other programs on the PC, eazyBackup tries to access the source disk at a low OS priority, but this may be ineffectual if your disk only supports a single queue. You can toggle the "Limit backup to use only 1 disk thread" option to force eazyBackup to make only a disk request to the source disk at a time. This may have a positive effect on other programs on the PC, at the expense of backup job performance.
  • Use of external harddrives
    • Is it USB 2 or USB 3?
    • Some disk drives may experience slow performance. You can use a benchmarking tool to determine the expected performance of the USB drive both in sequential reads, and in small random reads) independently of eazyBackup, as a baseline to compare against eazyBackup's performance.
      • At the time of writing, CrystalDiskMark is a popular freeware software for measuring disk performance on Windows.
    • Performance Mode
      • There is an option in Windows to control whether USB drives are configured for "Quick removal" (default) or "Better performance". Switching to the latter mode can significantly improve performance, but requires you to safely eject the drive. To change this setting:
        1. Open Device Manager > Disk drives > Properties > Policies tab
        2. If the "Quick removal" / "Better performance" radio option is available, ensure it is set to "Better performance"
        3. If the "Enable write caching" checkbox option is available, ensure that it is enabled
  • Backing up direct to cloud storage
    • Check the speed of your internet connection
    • Check the Internet service provider's status page, to ensure they are not currently experiencing any error

eazyBackup

Error “operation not permitted” macOS

Since macOS 10.14, Apple has introduced a new privacy flow. The user is now asked for permission when an app requires access to certain features or functions. The user will need to explicitly grant "Full Disk Access" to the eazyBackup application.

  1. Open the System Preferences (Apple menu)
  2. Select "Security and Privacy" > "Privacy" tab
  3. Select "Full Disk Access"
  4. Add eazyBackup

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Mount path conflict: Can’t mount path inside real directory

Backup reports the following error:

Invalid path 'C:\example\path\files': 
Mount path conflict: Can't mount path 'C:\example\path\files' 
inside real directory 'C:\example\'!

This issue is caused because both "C:\example\ " and  "C:\example\path\files " are included for backup. Because the former (C:\example\) is included, there's no need to specially include the latter (C:\example\path\files).

A new version of eazyBackup will have a filter to automatically skip this issue.

For now, you can work around this issue in eazyBackup by editing your protected item -> “items” tab, remove the included location "C:\example\".

Substitute C:\example\ for your own path.

 

eazyBackup

Lost connection to local service

The following error is displayed when opening eazyBackup

"Lost connection to local service.
Post /auth: open \.\pipe{backup.delegate Background Service}: The system cannot find the file specified."
This error indicates that the background service (eazyBackup delegate service) is either not running in the background or not present.

To resovel this issue, please restart the background services:

From the Windows search box type services.msc and open the Services App.

Services App

Locate the eazyBackup Delegate and Elevator services.

Select the each of the services and click the Restart button in the left side menu.

Verify that the service status shows Running after restarting both the delegate and elevator services.

eazyBackup Services

At this point you should be able to open eazyBackup normally from the start menu shortcut.

 

eazyBackup login

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Cannot proceed – another task needs to finish using the Storage Vault first.

Backup jobs may have the following error:

Error "Cannot proceed - Locked by device 'XXXXXXXX'..."

Occasionally devices will perform vault maintenace, during the maintenance processes devices can lock the vault for exclusive access. While the vault is locked, other devices cannot start writing to the vault. This lock ensures that data which is in the process of being added, but not yet fully-referenced in the index, is not deleted.

If the device is revoked or goes offline during the maintenance phase (power-cut, sudden sleep mode, network connection lost, etc), the locks may not be removed. The 'lock' will stay in place, and the vault will remain in a not-writeable state.

Step 1:

Cancel Running Backup from Control Panel

  1. Log-in to the Control Panel - https://panel.eazybackup.ca/
  2. From the main menu, select 'Job History'.
  3. You can use the Job istory Search feature to filter the list to show only running jobs - type 'Running' in the Job History filter field.
  4. Click the 'Report' button next to the Running job you want to Cancel
  5. On the Report page, click the Cancel button to stop the abandoned job.

If Step 1 did not resolve the issue, proceed to Step 2.

Step 2:

To clear the lock on the storage vault so new backup jobs can proceed you can run a retention pass on the storage vault.

    1. From the Backup Application menu, Click on Settings
    2. On the Storage Vaults tab, Right click on the Storage Vault -> Advanced -> Apply retention rules now

 

If you have multiple devices backing up to the same Storage Vault, consider using one Vault per Device.

Adding new Storage Vaults:
https://eazybackup.com/knowledge-base/add-a-new-storage-vault/

Update Protected Items to use the Storage Vaults:
https://eazybackup.com/knowledge-base/manage-vaults-on-protected-items-add-remove-update/

 

 

 

 

 

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