Travis Kensil - Church I.T.

Just thought I would post this in case anyone else has this issue…

About three weeks ago I noticed some of our backups and most importantly MozyPRO was having issues completing successful backups. After some investigations I found a series of random VSS errors in the logs; Microsoft and random Google searches didn’t really turn up anything of use. I also noticed that the VSS service seemed to randomly stop running and never automatically restart itself again.

In the past I have had success, when the print spooler service exhibited similiar symptoms, in simply stopping the service and grabbing a “good” version of the spooler file from either the windows disk or another workstation and simply overwriting the file, rebooting. My similiar logic applied in this scenario.

I stopped the VSS service, grabbed a “good” working copy from another one of our servers, replaced the existing and performed a reboot. So far so good…I have not seen any errors/issues currently because of this. The real test will be later tonight once our main backups and Mozy begin running….both which heavily utilize VSS.

I have not had much time to investigate how this issue begins or what causes it. I know some variables seem to be…

- An installation of Retrospect backup software (specifically the version for use with the Odyssey (http://www.imation.com/products/odyssey/index.html Removeable Hard Disk system)
- The MozyPRO client

I do believe the issue started after an unsuccessful install of the Odyssey product and somehow corrupted VSS. I want to do further testing to see if it was caused by Retrospect itself or some goofy driver issue. The problem definitely seemed to start once we attempted install of the Odyssey product.

Anyone else using an Odyssey hard disk product, install the software and wound up with a corrupt VSS service? I’ll keep this post updated as I discover more info. about this issue.