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Failed to get the size of '\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy1629' - The system cannot find the file specified

liam roberts
over 3 years ago

Hi All,

A backup has been failing recently with the error:

•Failed to get the size of '\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy1629' - The system cannot find the file specified

I have looked up the knowledge base which recommends configuring the shadow copy to no limit for the specific drive.  I have had this issue before and the KB article solution normally works a charm, however, this particular backup is still failing despite setting the VSS Snapshot to no limit.

In this instance is there anything else I can attempt?

Thank You.

  • +1 over 3 years ago

    Basically that error simply means that the shadow copy that was being used during backup was deleted unexpectedly by Windows. If you look in the Windows System Event log for errors at the same time as the backup, there should be VSS errors with exact details as to why the shadow copy was deleted. Once you have that info you should better be able to diagnose what's happening. A lot of time the error is something to the effect of "the shadow copy storage could not grow in time" so setting it to no limit resolves that problem by allocating more than enough space for the shadow copy up front. In your case, since that didn't help, you are probably getting a different error. So find that error in the Windows System Event log and that will help a lot with finding the root cause of the problem.

  • +1 over 3 years ago in reply to Tim Seymour

    Thank you Tim, i'll take a look right now :)

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to liam roberts

    Hi Tim, Thank you for your help.  I'm relatively new to technically supporting back ups and so im still learning.  You were spot on.

    There was insufficient disk space on volume C: to grow the shadow copy storage for shadow copies of C:.  As a result of this failure all shadow copies of volume C: are at risk of being deleted.  There is 4.69gb free, I though maybe it would be enough so didn't give it a thought.  I'll know for in future.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to liam roberts

    Cool. Glad you found the root cause. How much free space is needed for shadow copy is dependent on amount of change occurring on the system and the size of the total data being backed up. Ideally you should have at least 10% free space on the volume (our UI reports a warning starting at 30% free). So definitely freeing up some space on that volume should help get things working again. The other option is you could change where the shadow copy storage location for that volume is. For instance if you only have 4.69 GB free on C: but you have a D: volume with 100 GB free, you could change the shadow copy storage location for C: to be on D: instead. That's an option in the same place within windows where you set the shadow copy storage size to no limit.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    Hello I'm actually getting the same error but I don't have shadow copy enable how can I fix this error?

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to npinzon

    It's common that you don't have shadow copies enabled, that simply means that you aren't using the OS to do your backups on top of your backup solution (like RR in this case). The same troubleshooting applies, the error generally references the fact that MS didn't have enough space to build/maintain the snapshot during the course of the backup. If you go to your MS event viewer on the machine that your trying to backup, and look at the system and/or event logs around the time the job failed, you'll see your error. It will more than likely tell you the volume in the error to validate which of your volumes doesn't have enough space to perform the task.