Shadow Copy Problem

[mickeyh080]

Have shadow copy enabled on two identical Dell servers shadowing 2 drives Staff data on one and Students on the other. Everything works fine initially with previous versions available for both drives up until what appears to be the point where by the usuable space is full and its suppose to overright the oldest files. Unfortunately it just dumps all previous versions and the service stops. Heard somewhere that by limiting the size as opposed to letting it use all the available space it might help but to no avail. Any suggestions would be grateful.

[cookie_monster]

How much data are you shadowing?

Is the drive where the shadow copies are kept seperate from the data?

What error messages are you seeing when the shadow copies are lost?

[mickeyh080]

The students drive is approx 110 GB. Larger on the second server for staff.

The shadow copies are stored on the same drive.

The event viewer shows:

Source Volsnap
Event ID 35

"The shadow copies of volume G: were aborted because the shadow copy storage failed to grow"

[cookie_monster]

What service pack level is the OS at?

Also is it dumping the shadow copies at a certain time e.g during a backup/AV scan or other high load period?

[Paid_Peanuts]

We came across exactly the same!
There is a MS webpage somewhere which says if it is a drive of a high I/O then shadow copies can be lost.
The work around for this is to implement Data Protection Manager.

[Paid_Peanuts]

In very rare situations, on high-end systems, shadow copies for shared folders might be lost due to very high I/O activity. This issue was experienced by very few customers, and addressed by the latest VSS cumulative hotfixes: KB 833167 and KB 887827. See their associated web pages for more details

[cookie_monster]

@ Paid_Peanuts: That's what i was getting at with the high load and SP level question but MS say those fixes are in SP1 and even more improvements were made in SP2.

[mickeyh080]

Using Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP2 R2 on both servers.

The shadow copies are carried out at 7am and 1pm daily. The last failure occured at 1:42pm.

Looking at the event log it seems the volsnap error starts as an information entry showing the deletion of the old records in this last case 55 records before showing a warning

"There was insufficient disk space on volume G: to grow the shadow copy storage for shadow copies of G:. As a result of this failure all shadow copies of volume G: are at risk of being deleted."

Then the error "

The shadow copies of volume G: were aborted because the shadow copy storage failed to grow."

At this time of day there are no additional backups occuring.

[notalot]

What about defrag's?

[Slartibartfast]

Defragmenting a drive can cause the shadow copies to be deleted (see Shadow copies may be lost when you defragment a volume).

I suspect that this may be due to the shadow copy storage area being on the same volume. I encountered this issue the other day (VolSnap Event ID 25) - moving the shadow copies to another volume seems to have solved it (but beware of All shadow copies of shared folders are deleted when you start Windows Server 2003).

Also see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826936/en-us .