Windows Server Backups failing

[mdench]

We have several servers here which are failing on their scheduled windows server backups with an error of access is denied on bare metal recovery - System reserve. But if you run the job manually it completes with no errors? All backups are set to backup to a network location.

 

As far as I can tell we haven't changed anything recently

 

Any one seen anything / heard of anything like this?

[Michael]

What software are you using? And have you tried creating a new job to see if this works?

[mdench]

The windows Server backup wizard and yeah I have tried recreating the jobs no joy

[3s-gtech]

Yes, I've had this. There were several things that stopped my backups:

 

Backups not running with highest privileges (which can be changed from the Scheduled Task window)

Certain servers (mostly 2008 R2) just would not run Scheduled Tasks reliably, with permission errors, no errors but no backups, etc. I got fed up and created a dedicated backup management VM on 2012 R2 for this that does all of them.

Bare metal backups have a real odd issue, where the 100MB System Reserved partition tries to back up, but there isn't enough free space on it for VSS to create a copy, and it fails the whole job. Two solutions - either don't backup these partitions, or resize them so they have some free space.

 

Hope these help.

[mdench]

I have checked and they are all running with highest privileges and if you run the backup manually it works fine. It seems like a permission thing as it says Access is denied with trying to bare metal recovery the system reserved at the very beginning.

[Michael]

The only thing I can think of is look at the Task Manager job properties. As well as running with the highest privileges, make sure it runs irrelevant if the user (admin) is logged in. This is an option on the same window.