Veeam server backup fails with snapshot / shadow copy error

This post is for me in case it happens again—it may not work for you.

If the Veeam backup on the server fails with the error message below, it’s likely because the server has been rebooted (perhaps after an update, or a power outage) and certain services either didn’t restart correctly or have to be stopped.

Do this on the server:

1. Restart these services:
   • COM + Event System
   • COM + System Application services
2. Stop this service:
   • Volume Shadow Copy

*****

Error message:

Creating VSS snapshot Error: Failed to create snapshot: Backup job failed. Cannot create a shadow copy of the volumes containing writer’s data. A VSS critical writer has failed. Writer name: [SqlServerWriter]. Class ID: [{a65faa63-5ea8-4ebc-9dbd-a0c4db26912a}]. Instance ID: [{41816b15-69f7-4f0f-8182-54b69d6f8a7a}]. Writer’s state: [VSS_WS_FAILED_AT_PREPARE_SNAPSHOT]. Error code: [0x800423f4].

 

 

 

Centrelink ‘Something’s gone wrong’ document upload error message

This post is only relevant to Australians

I continued to get a ‘Something’s gone wrong. Please try again’ error every time I tried to upload a 1.6 MB PDF to Centrelink. The max size is 5 MB so it wasn’t that, and PDF is an acceptable format, so it wasn’t that either. As with errors like this, you follow the instructions to try again, but after about 10 tries I gave up and thought I’d have to take the document into my nearest Centrelink office, a 50 km round trip away. Not something I looked forward to, especially for something that should just work and for something that Centrelink INSISTS you send to them within 14 days of a change of circumstance.

Instead, I decided to Google for a solution and I found this webpage: https://leonswebsite906327562.wordpress.com/2020/11/27/how-to-upload-a-file-to-centrelink-when-somethings-gone-wrong/

I read the article and the comments and followed the instructions to ‘print’ the document to a file, but it ended up being about 10 MB, too big for Centrelink. Fortunately, I know how to use Adobe Acrobat, so I checked the file’s contents and realised that I could delete 23 of the 38 pages as that info was irrelevant for Centrelink. That reduced the file size to 2 MB, which I successfully uploaded to Centrelink on the next try.

Thanks very much, Leon, for your great instructions! I didn’t have to resort to sending the file to the PM :-)

[Link last checked October 2022]