volsnap eventID can cause sudden deletion of Windows Shadow Copy

 

 

Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy is a great tool for fast recovery of data, like deleted files . Under any circumstances should you treat this tool as a backup !!! always have anther mean of backup mechanism taking backups outside the server or even the organization, like cloud backup. Having sad that, restoring from shadow copy is fast and simple and can be a life saver to the production environment in terms of recovery time. By default, once you enable the shadow copy, you might run in scenario which will cause the shadow copy to failed or to get deleted while being created or even during restoration . those are the common events that pops and make you failed  :

Event ID: 14
Source:  volsnap
Level: Error
Description:  The shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because of an IO failure on volume C:

Event ID: 25
Source:  volsnap
Level: Error
Description:  The shadow copies of volume C: were deleted because the shadow copy storage could not grow in time.  Consider reducing the IO load on the system or choose a shadow copy storage volume that is not being shadow copied.

Event ID: 33
Source: volsnap
Level: Information
Description: The oldest shadow copy of volume C: was deleted to keep disk space usage for shadow copies of volume C: below the user defined limit.

 

Event ID: 35
Source: volsnap
Level: error
Description: The shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because the shadow copy storage failed to grow.

 

Event ID: 36
Source: volsnap
Level: error
Description: The shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because the shadow copy storage could not grow due to a user imposed limit.

 

A very good idea is to move the shadow copy of one drive or volume to another and give the shadow copy enough space to grow, that way you might escape IO errors and size errors. To do that you can use vssadmin tool. To see all the disk space taken by shadow copy execute in elevated command prompted :

vssadmin list shadowstorage 

This will show you haw much space is taken by the shadow copy, to increase the size is Gigabytes you can use :

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=20GB

In procentage :

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=20% 

To Use Different volume First you need to delete the current shadow copy by clicking  System Protection turned OFF then if you want to use

disk D: for Drive C: shadow copy storage using max size of 20% of drive D: you can use :

vssadmin add shadowstorage /for=C: /on=D: /MaxSize=20%

Or

vssadmin add shadowstorage /for=C: /on=D: /MaxSize=100GB

Then turn ON the System Protection

You can read more read more about VSSADMIN here

 


Good Luck

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