This is a really strange issue for me. I am not sure what the cause is, but I was hoping that someone here could perhaps point me in the right direction.
We run two backups a night on one of our servers. Each backup goes to a different destination. The first of those backups failed recently and the error in the backup was pointing to the VSS writers being the cause of the backup failure.
Unfortunately, I did not find out about the backup failing before the second backup started. As the second system backup was running, I went ahead and executed the "list writers" command on the server to see if I could at least determine which writers had failed. After running the command on the system, I discovered that the "System" and the "NDTS writers" were in a failed state with a "time out" as the last error. I also checked the event logs, but I did not find a single error message there which pointed to the cause of the vss errors.
Usually, I just reboot the server if I see writers in a failed state, but this time I could not do that with the second backup running.
I was pretty sure that the backup would eventually fail when it got to the system state portion of the backup, but I was surprised (and a little confused) when the backup proceeded to complete without any errors at all. I was even more surprised after running the "List writers" command again after the backup completed. I found that all of the writers were in a stable state with no errors. What gives? I thought that the writers always had to be reset after failing before they would work again. Nothing had been rebooted or reset (to my knowledge) between the time the first backup failed and the second one ran.
Does anyone have any ideas? This server is Server 2008 Enterprise with no Exchange server on it and just an Active Directory domain controller. Also, if anyone could help me figure out what caused the vss writers to fail in the first place, that would be ideal. No errors in the event log makes this really difficult to troubleshoot.
Thanks.