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I’ve been using Agent for Windows for a long time. I’m setup to do scheduled daily Entire Computer backups to Shared Folder (on DSM) with periodic Active full backups early one morning each month, with periodic health checks one other morning each month, and with 32-days retention. It’s been rock-solid dependable. Until Windows 11, that is. On Windows 11, I’m seeing two issues:

First, and most critical, is that it doesn’t seem to be respecting the periodic full backup setting or reliably respecting the 32-day retention cleanup of obsolete backups. Three months in a row now, I’ve looked the morning after the full backup was supposed to have run and found only the incremental ran--or even it didn’t run (see next issue). I’ve done full backup on request from the UI. This morning for my laptop I have at least 71 backups, full or incremental, with 33 incrementals newer than the second oldest full. The oldest full is 12/25/22--69 days old, with newer full sets on 1/30/23 (33 days) and 2/26/23.

The second issue is that it seems to be reporting lots of failures for “shared memory” or “file in use” or “destination not found” (I’d have to go culling through retry logs to find all the precise messages) and sometime it just doesn’t wake the machine up to run at all. When I login to the machine later in the morning after it was supposed to run a backup, I frequently find the Agent starting the nth retry and, while I’m watching, it finishes successfully--sometimes after multiple more retries due to “file in use” errors. These failed backups tend to leave orphaned 1.5MB (+/-) incremental files that the 32-day cleanup doesn’t delete even when it runs.

Anybody else having issues with the Agent for Windows on Windows 11?

Could be a problem with unreliable connection to your shared folder.

Do you have some exact error messages or some log files?

I’ve never seen error messages that give any hint why it’s not doing the Full Backup on the morning scheduled or the post-retention period cleanup of obsolete backups. It just doesn’t happen. And doing an unscheduled backup requested from the UI does not seem to force it to process the retention rule.

I agree completely that the second problem seems to be network connectivity related. It’s as though Agent has awakened the computer into some intermediate state where network connectivity is not yet happy before Veeam starts trying to do its thing. I never see this when I login later in the morning and it (fully awakes?) and completes the backup. (Then the only issue I see is this occasional variable number of retries due to “file in use”. I wish I could find a log entry with one of those to paste here, but it seems that hasn’t occurred in last six days.) Nor do I see it when using the UI to request an unscheduled backup. Some bad karma between the Agent and Windows 11 sleep states seems like the issue here.

Here are two example errors from recently on the laptop. (I can’t go back older than seven backups in the control panel. Are the logs stored somewhere by default?)

(on retry 2:) 2/27/2023 2:07:00 AM :: Error: XPS13] Failed to check whether file or folder \\ds218plus\windows client backups\Job XPS13\Job XPS132023-02-26T060336.vbk exists. The semaphore timeout period has expired 

(on retry 15:) 3/3/2023 2:53:41 AM :: Error: 2XPS13] Failed to get disk free space. The network path was not found. Failed to get free space on disk '\\ds218plus\windows client backups' 

As noted, when I request backups from the UI, these backup errors do not occur. They also do not occur on my soon-to-be-retired aged Windows 10 desktop machine on the same network backing up to the same NAS with the same scheduled settings.

There are some more threads with problems to wake up Windows 11 by the agent. Probably there is a problem either with Win 11 or the Agent.

You could try to wake up your PC with another event 10 minutes before the backup occurs….

Anyone know if Veeam is aware of this and working on it? I’m just a home user with a NAS using the free Agent. Not sure if they want users like me clogging up their support channels with cases or will even accept a case from free Agent users.

Agent has been rock-solid stable on Windows 10. On Windows 11, now on two of my machines, not so much.

You can open a support ticket as an user of the free agent.

It’s just on best-effort basis then. And it is possible that it is closed when there is heavy load in support.

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