Troubleshooting Volume Shadow Copy Errors: First Steps

How to Find the Cause of VSS Errors

In order to fix Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) errors in your system, and before you dive into the details of our Volume Shadow Copy Service Error Troubleshooting Guide, you need to know exactly what causes these errors in your system. If you encounter VSS failures in BackupChain, you’ll need to check the Windows Event Viewer as follows:

 Download our freeware VssDiag™ tool which helps you find and fix VSS errors. It automates most of the steps shown below.

Open the Windows Event Viewer and check the Windows Logs, Application and System. Look for Disk, VSS, and VolSnap entries occurring at the time of backup or approximately the time when the error is reported in BackupChain:

VSS error event viewer step 1

The error may look like this:

vss error example

VolSnap entries may look like this:

volsnap error example

What you need to do next if you are using Hyper-V, is to check the Hyper-V logs (following section).

It also helps to run search using your favorite search engine and search for: VOLSNAP 27 or VSS 8193.

You basically use the Event ID and Source in your search to find additional information online on how to fix your particular error.

Most of the time, however, the way to fix the error becomes obvious when reading the error message, see the following Hyper-V example:

Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Errors

If you are using Hyper-V, you may find additional Hyper-V VSS error information by navigating further down to:

Applications and Services Logs -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Hyper-V XXXXXXX

You will find about a dozen different Hyper-V logs and more often than not you’ll find the answer to your problem right there.

The following example shows that the virtual machine’s Hyper-V Integration Services are not available or installed:

volume shadow copy service error hyper-v event viewer

Please collect as much information as possible and email the exported Event Viewer logs to our support for further investigation.

Fixing Volume Shadow Copy Errors

Please also look into our Volume Shadow Copy Service Error Troubleshooting Guide for additional clues. It contains a dozen different strategies and may help you resolve the problem in just a couple of minutes.