Windows Backup Fails because the Volume Shadow Copy Service operation failed
In a recent attempt to create a full system backup of a Windows 2008 R2 server with Hyper-V installed and a few virtual machines running on this physical box, the backup job failed after a while. After some investigation an error has been discovered in the System Event Log:
Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Backup
Date: 31/05/2012 18:22:39
Event ID: 521
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords:
User: SYSTEM
Computer: server.domain.local
Description:
The backup operation that started at ‘2012-05-31T17:12:38.194000000Z’ has failed because the Volume Shadow Copy Service operation to create a shadow copy of the volumes being backed up failed with following error code ‘2155348001’. Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.
As with any problem a quick search revealed there have been many users struggling with this problem. As this was more like a once of backup, the quickest solution turned out to be a very simple one. All that was needed was to stop the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service either using the Services console or by running the command:
> net stop vmms
As soon as data transfer began, this service can be restarted and the full system backup will finish successfully.