You may come across a few problems when using DPM or Simply just windows backup when trying to back up “System State” on WINDOWS 2008.

The first problem you may come across if you have a single drive is that System State will not backup to a critical volume by default. So you have to set the below registry key to allow this to happen.

“Registry entry to enable system state backups to critical volumes

To enable the system state backup files to be targeted to critical volumes, you must set the value of the AllowSSBToAnyVolume registry entry under the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServiceswbengineSystemStateBackup

Set the value of this entry as follows:

Name: AllowSSBToAnyVolume
Data type: DWORD
Value data: 1

Note When this value is set to 1, system state backups to any volume are enabled. To revert to the default behavior, set the value to 0.”

You may have the issue we had recently also where the  above  regkey is already set to 1, windows backup was installed and there was enough free space, so no obvious reason why the backup should have failed.

But you will notice the below event errors at the same point the backup fails.

“EVENT ID 517

Backup started at ’02/12/2009 09:25:29′ failed with following error code ’2155348165′ ( There was a failure in preparing the backup image of one of the volumes in the backup set. ). Please rerun backup once issue is resolved.

EVENT ID 8193

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine ConvertStringSidToSid.  hr = 0×80070539.

Operation:
OnIdentify event
Gathering Writer Data

Context:
Execution Context: Shadow Copy Optimization Writer
Writer Class Id: {4dc3bdd4-ab48-4d07-adb0-3bee2926fd7f}
Writer Name: Shadow Copy Optimization Writer
Writer Instance ID: {06ff818a-6da7-4d9c-920b-df9c6309748e}”

Fix

To fix this we had to do the following

1. Create a backup of the registry

2. Delete the following key HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftEventSystem{26c409cc-ae86-11d1-b616-00805fc79216}Subscriptions (leave the EventClass subkey)

3. Restart the server.

4. Run the “VSSADMIN LIST WRITERS” from command Prompt. This causes the regkeys to be recreated and rebuilds the VSS writers.

After this all started working.

Daniel Davies

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