Microsoft Crappy VSS

Mark Bellows on the EMC forums posted some good stuff about toubleshooting some bad backup software with this great list that happens to show how much M$ VSS sucks too:

VSS snapshot creation may fail after a LUN resynchronization on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 - November 25, 2009
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976099
Backup fails with VSS Event ID 12292 and 11 on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 - January 20, 2010
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009513
No VSS writers are listed when you run the “vssadmin list writers” command in Windows Server 2008 R2
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009550
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009533
Windows 2008 R2 64-bit backup failed
http://solutions.emc.com/emcsolutionview.asp?id=esg108377
System State backup using Windows Server Backup fails with error: System writer is not found in the backup
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009272

A VSS hardware snapshot database keeps growing with duplicated ...

(959476) - ... VSS) requestor instances with VSS hardware provider to delete snapshots in Windows Server 2008 ... Important Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 hotfixes ...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959476

A snapshot may become corrupted when the Volume Shadow Copy ...

(975688) - Fixes a problem in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2 in which a snapshot may become corrupted when the VSS snapshots providers takes more than 10 ...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975688

A virtual machine online backup fails in Windows Server 2008 R2 ...

This issue occurs because the Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Service (Hyper-V VSS ... Important Windows 7 hotfixes and Windows Server 2008 R2 hotfixes are included in ...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2521348

You cannot safely remove volumes after you perform a VSS backup ...

(2487341) - ... files after you perform a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) backup operation in Windows Server 2008 SP2. ... Windows Vista hotfixes and Windows Server 2008 hotfixes ...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2487341

Also, please note that not all of these fixes come with Windows update and are used on a case by case situation.

Now, from the client side, one thing you can do is to check on the status of VSS from the command line using vssadmin.

Here are a couple of MS KB articles to get you started:

Vssadmin usage

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754968(WS.10).aspx

Manage Volume Shadow Copy Service from the Vssadmin Command-Line

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd348398.aspx

How to enable the Volume Shadow Copy service's debug tracing features in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2008

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/887013

Oh - one other thing you do from both the server and the client (I would start with the client to see if it is showing any errors) is to render the daemon.raw file.

To do this, make a copy of the /nsr/logs/daemon.raw file - I typically rename the copy to be daemon_YYYYmonthnameDD.raw.

From the command line, navigate to the directory the copied daemon.raw file is in, then run:

nsr_render_log daemon_YYYYmonthnameDD.raw >daemon_YYmonthnameDD.log

ie. nsr_render_log daemon_2012Jan27.raw >daemon_2012Jan27.log

You can then open the file through windows explorer with note pad or word pad and read the contents.  It may take a little time to get to the portion you need, but know when the backup started will help.