We've been running Windows Server Backup on Windows Server 2012 Essentials successfully for a while now. Backups are performed nightly and have been completing successfully on a schedule. We have been rotating between 3 (sometimes 4) USB connected external drives. Yesterday, I changed the configuration to target just 1 drive. It was 75% complete this morning but I wanted to stop the backup to continue some configuration changes (we recently encrypted both our internal system and data drives -both are included in the backups - and I wanted to start a BitLocker encryption of one of another backup drive)
The documented way to Stop a Backup from Dashboard is to simply find your server in Devices, right-mouse-click it, and choose "Stop backup for the server". Unfortunately, this has no effect and the backup appears to be hung (have waited a couple of hours now for it to stop gracefully).
I have tried launching wbadmin but it, too, appears to be hung showing "Reading data; please wait..."
Short of physically disconnecting the USB drive or rebooting the server, is there any way to stop the processes involved? I have had trouble trying to locate the processes involved via Task Manager. When I do, I can usually kill backup in this fashion, but I usually have to follow this with a server reboot before I can use Windows Backup successfully again. So any help here would be appreciated.
This issue of not being able to stop a running backup has been frequent with us under many different circumstances and usually happens whenever we suspect a backup will not finish in a timely fashion (for example, changing the backup schedule to target a different number of drives when not all our drives are physically connected seems to confuse Windows Server Backup). Workaround has been just to wait for the backup to finish - even if it appears to be hung. Sometimes it finishes, other times not.
Checking the event log, it shows a volsnap Event ID 25 error from early this morning that may or may not be related to the fact we can't stop the backup. Interestingly, the description in Event Viewer for this error reads "The description for Event ID 25 from source volsnap cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer. If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event. The following information was included with the event: \Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy239 I: The locale specific resource for the desired message is not present" -- Why??
I think this is referring to our recently encrypted drive which I assigned a device letter of "I:". It is connected to the server along with our "hung" backup drive that I had targeted yesterday when I changed our Backup Schedule and configuration.
Thanks in advance for any help or insight you can share.
Carl