How to Fix SQL Error: 18210, Severity: 16, Error 3041

When backing up a VM that runs SQL Server inside you may run into the following issue.

The VM backup fails and the Event Viewer on the host reports a VSS writer inside the VM failed.

Upon inspection of the VM’s Event Viewer and SQL Server’s logs you find:

Error: 18210, Severity: 16
and
Error 3041
"Access Denied"

It turns out the SQL backup, which is triggered by the VM backup, cannot proceed because the local system user (the default for the SQL Server VSS Writer) doesn’t have access to certain resources.

Switching to a local administrator account resolves the issue.

To do that, open “Services” via the Control Panel, open the properties of SQL Server VSS Writer, switch to the Log On tab and change the user to a local admin user. Then restart the service and run the backup again.

BackupChain Features

Since you work with Microsoft SQL Server, you may want to check out how BackupChain can help you create a SQL Server backup and perhaps a file server backup, too. As a hard drive backup software, BackupChain offers far more than just file backup and USB backup; BackupChain also offers a multitude of features related to virtualization and various hypervisors.
Beyond using BackupChain as a copy tool for Windows, you can create a backup for virtual machine guests using incremental backup and differential backup technologies that build on virtual disk deduplication.
Our features for Hyper-V make BackupChain one of the best Hyper-V backup solutions on the market tailored to the needs of SMBs. You can set up various backup tasks to take live Hyper-V backups to USB, with support for Cluster Shared Volume backups, Hyper-V file backup and also Linux VM backup amongst many other features. To restore Hyper-V backups, you can always access the Hyper-V file backup folder directly and extract any file you need, or use our granular recovery technology to restore individual items from the VM’s file system immediately via the user interface. Furthermore, BackupChain is also the only backup software with Windows 10 Hyper-V backup support.
As the only backup tool on the market with granular backup, BackupChain offers direct access to the live virtual machine file system from the host, without installing backup agents inside each guest. This feature also works whether you set up a CSV backup or a Hyper-V USB backup, regardless of target.
A major tool that saves money and time is Hyper-V deduplication, which also works on other hypervisors, for example, when you create a VMware backup, or automatic VirtualBox backup. When you use deduplication, BackupChain maintains a version backup of each file separately (full compressed backup + incremental deltas) and this technique is ideal when you also push your backups to the cloud to FTP cloud backup storage using our cloud server backup.
BackupChain is not limited to live backup of virtual machines, it’s also a great Windows backup software that includes EDB backup and Outlook backup. What makes BackupChain one of the best backup software deals on the market is that it’s flexible so that you can set up any combination of best server backup practices in your unique environment without much work.
What complements our FTP backup software and FTP server, is DriveMaker, our freeware FTP client and various other freeware for Windows we provide on our site.