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Dear Community,

 

Recently, I encountered an issue while running a scheduled backup job using Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows. The backup failed with the error "Failed to create VSS snapshot."

Successfully resolved the issue, and I’d like to share the steps I took in case they help.

 

Solution That Worked:


Simply by restarting the VSS (Volume Shadow Copy) service, which might have become unstable or stuck.

 

Here’s what I did:

Opened an Command Prompt (Run as Administrator)

Ran the following commands:

  • net stop vss
  • net start vss

 

You can also restart these services in services.msc:

  • Volume Shadow Copy
  • Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider

 

That’s it! After this, I re-ran the backup job and it completed successfully without any errors.

 

As a Veeam Community member, I truly appreciate the robustness of Veeam tools this issue highlighted the importance of VSS for reliable backups, and I hope this article helps others facing the same error; feel free to reply or DM me if you need further help happy to assist!

 

 

Thanks for shring this how to article. 

its good to check if some service is unstable and check after restart of VSS again by cmd:

vssadmin list writers

 

it depends, what is installed on the server, you can check as well (could be another provider used than Microsoft, what could cause issues):

vssadmin list providers

That’s a great point!

Running vssadmin list writers is indeed a helpful step to verify whether any VSS writers are in a failed or unstable state and to identify the reason for the failure.

In most causes VSS failures are caused by,

Insufficient disk space on the volume where the shadow copy is created

VSS writer conflicts due to multiple backup or snapshot tools running simultaneously.

It’s also a good idea to run vssadmin list shadows to view all existing shadow copies on the server. You can remove outdated or unnecessary copies to free up space

 

 

Thanks for sharing what resolved it for you ​@waqasali 

VSS is always a pain at times.  Glad you were able to fix the issue by just restarting the service and not the entire system. 

VSS always gives me a headache! Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for shring this how to article. 

you are welcome.

Thanks for sharing what resolved it for you ​@waqasali 

 

Yes right.

VSS always gives me a headache! Thanks for sharing.

This helps me very quickly.

Hi, thanks for sharing. 

I also encountered this issue on our machines and in my case it’s relative to Sentinel One’s protection. 

You must disable AntiTampering’s functionality called DCSafeBoot. I have the command if you may need it. 

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