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Failed to start creating the volume snapshot. The shadow copy provider had an error.

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Hello,

I suddenly started getting this error (which is repeated/retried 30 times before the backup fails) on my ATI 2016 incremental backup:

40    True Image    20/06/2016 1:29:14 PM    Pending operation 172 started: 'Creating partition image'.
41        20/06/2016 1:29:22 PM    Locking partition U:...
42    True Image    20/06/2016 1:29:24 PM    VSS retry: 1
43    True Image    20/06/2016 1:29:24 PM    Failed to start creating the volume snapshot.
44    True Image    20/06/2016 1:29:24 PM    The shadow copy provider had an error. Check the System and Application event logs for more information.

Any ideas regarding what this might be and how to get the backups running again? I have lots of space available on both the source partitions (one is iSCSI mounted from my NAS) and backup drive.

Thanks.

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You are getting a Windows VSS error which may show corruption of the VSS service.  Finding the root of that error will not be easy, but checking your Windows logs is a good place to start.

As for backups, you can disable VSS within each backup script and let Acronis restort back to the proprietary snapapi backup method as was used by default in 2014 and earlier versions and see if that allows the backup to run without VSS:

Disable VSS 3 ways (try #1 first) 

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try this/these. From the looks of some of the recent comments on this I may have been bitten by this as a result of the most recent ATI 2016 update :(. Whatever it is, why on earth is it not more straightforward to troubleshoot/fix? Pretty rediculous that this just starts happening out of the blue.

I'll look into the Windows logs further, but my first glance at this didn't identify anything obvious. Can you say anything more about "may show corruption of the VSS service"? That sounds ominous and, in my mind, somewhat of a red herring considering how solid things have been for a while now.

Thx.

Your log file is showing that VSS cannot lock the system files and is retrying without success.  Why that is, is a bit of a mystery and the Windows logs may provide more details.  VSS issues are not uncommon in Windows and can be difficult to troubleshoot.  

The shadow copy provider had an error. Check the System and Application event logs for more information

Disabling VSS for individual backup tasks will not diable VSS in Windows.  Prior to Acronis 2015, VSS wasn't used at all and disabling it for a specific backup task or tasks will force it to default to the original Acronis SnapAPI backup method.  Unless you're running Oracle or SQL Databases on your machine, Snapapi backup method does just fine.  VSS is needed to properly image active SQL databases though to avoid corruption of those particular databases. 

As a backup issue, I'd also suggest submitting feedback in the app, attach a system report and then send a PM to one of the support engineers (Ekaterina) and reference this thread in your feedback submission. 

You might try a simple reboot of the system first, sometimes that step works wonders.

Disabling VSS (in favour of the SnapAPI) has fixed this. Thx for everyone's help on this. I'll also follow-up with Ekaterina via PM.