Langalist: Common reasons for backup and imaging failures

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So your backup didn’t, you know, back up. Why? As Fred Langa points out, that isn’t always an easy question. But he has answers. The latest LangaList
[See the full post at: Langalist: Common reasons for backup and imaging failures]

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Elly

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Thanks for this!

I use the excellent Macrium Reflect to make regular full system image backups (Win7 and Win10).

In Win7 it always has the error message shown in the attached file. There is a problem with the VVS.

It says there is a failure, and then writes: Retrying without the VVS Writers.

Then it writes: Success. And the copy proceeds normally. It goes on to verify the copy afterwards (if you ask for it, which I always do).

So it works for me but I have previously tried to fix the error. Now I think Fred’s article gives the answer – I have multiboot (grub2), (and it (usually) works fine). Thanks for that information!

PS. I have multiboot on the Windows 7 machine – with Win7, Linux Mint 17.3 + 19.1, and Linux Q4OS. Linux Mint 19.1 has the grub2 multiboot. Recently I ran into a boot problem but it could be fixed with a “super grub2 boot” USB.

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Fred writes:
“Dual Booting: Using the Grub2 bootloader in a Windows/Linux dual-boot setup can confuse VSS. (Yet another reason why I personally dislike dual-boot setups.)”

Where does the problem actually lie? And, in consequence, should Microsoft or the Grub2 authors “sort it out”?

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Any non-default boot process or disk management, actually… since VSS does things at the partition table level at least.

So it’s not only Windows/Linux dual-boot setups. It’s potentially any setup that has partitions Windows doesn’t recognize, which may even include some hardware vendor specific recovery setups. (Not likely on new systems but ISTR there having been one back when VSS was new.) Also some things you could (might not want to, but could) otherwise do with a RAID that depends on installed drivers.

It also breaks in specific situations with a dual Windows boot setup if one is Vista or newer and the other XP or older, and/or if one is 8 or newer and another 7 or older.

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I never make an image from within Windows. I always boot to my rescue media and make my image from there. I have never had an error or failure. I’m using Macrium and Acronis, and I alternate my images between the two, just to be safe.

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Hello, for example – since Dell is using NVMe harddrives recently, my acronis true image is not possible to use anymore. I will dig deeper into this issue, but it seems to me, that Acronis and PCIe port are not friends. Understand, that backup of Optiplex 9050 was OK, but backup of 9060 is not possible now. Acronis ends up with error “No harddrives found, nothing to backup”. Also, when I tried to modify setup (BIOS/ UEFI, GPT/ MBR), I nearly always broke the installation and only bluescreen with error was loaded – reinstall WIN from scratch :/
So the very common reason for backup failure is mz HW.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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