ASK

I had a set of Windows 2008R2 servers today that were having trouble backing up the system state via Windows Server Backup – they would fail with the error “System writer is not found in the backup”. I scoured the ‘net and talked to colleagues, and all of the resolutions I could find involved re-registering components, re-securing things in the Cryptography Service (prompted by CAPI or CryptSvc errors in the event log), setting ownership on WinSXS folders, etc. I did not have any such errors in my logs to indicate a permissions issue – in fact, I saw no errors at all (usually good – not so much when something is broken!). However, every time I ran “vssadmin list writers”, indeed the system writer was missing. After taking a procmon, I noticed that the last thing that was searched were some setupapi.ev* files in \Windows\Inf: I decided, on a whim, to replace these files with files from another server I had that was working – I stopped the VSS and CryptSvc services (th...

The difference between a snapshot and a backup: A snapshot is, think about it as a Polaroid picture. You’re out, and you’re having fun with your friends, and somebody snaps a Polaroid or an Instagram or whatever the kids are using nowadays. It’s just that. It’s an instant point in time. This can be appropriate for certain types of data and it can be inappropriate for other types of data. The reason why is because the snapshot, it generally happens again at the storage level, so it doesn’t have that intelligence, maybe that a true backup software or backup product has where it lives inside the operating system. Maybe it can communicate with your database server or your exchange server. If you have something that’s very memory-intensive … Let’s take, for example, a SQL server, and it’s very transactional, you’re running a lot of database transactions very frequently, unless you get into some really, really specifics on storage array snapshots, you could end up in a state...