Hi, I wonder if someone can help with an issue I am having with running incremental backup on a windows 2003 server with sp1. I keep getting the following 2 error messages for incremental backup: Error from NTBackup report: Volume shadow copy creation: Attempt 1. Timeout before function completed Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:0xffffffff. Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:ffffffff Aborting Backup. ---------------------- The operation did not successfully complete. ---------------------- VSS error from Event Logs: Volume Shadow Copy Service information: The COM Server with CLSID {e579ab5f-1cc4-44b4-bed9-de0991ff0623} and name Coordinator cannot be started. [0x80070422] The server has no issues doing a full backup, this problem only seems to happen with incerminatl backup. I disabled VSS on the services and tried the backup but again same error!! Please help!! Thanks Ash Ashraf Abdul

Have you checked those error messages on microsoft's knowledge base yet? If not, start there and if you can't find an answer in there, try google. If neither one of those yields anything, come back in here and ask.

Why are you doing incramental backups ... you should do differential backups. In incramental backups if any tape is bad then you can't restore data on any tape after the one that failed

Depending on the amount of data to be backed up and the size of the backup media my preference has always been full backups.

Hi Guy’s, Thanks for your replay, just to let you know I did search Google and Microsoft website before posting this and could not resolve the issue. Anyway just to let you know I have managed to resolve the problem, I needed to set the Microsoft Software Shadow copy provider in services to manual as this was currently on started status on this particular server. Thanks Ashraf Abdul