Macrium Reflect More Other Information

Macrium Reflect uses a Microsoft service called Volume Shadow copy Service to enable disk images to be created and files to be backed up when in use.

When VSS fails it can sometimes mean that you are unable to create a disk image or backup open files with Macrium Reflect. In this tutorial I’ll take you through some troubleshooting steps to locate and fix VSS problems and enable your disk images and file backups to complete successfully.

Please Note: Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service is a standard Windows service and not installed by Macrium Reflect. VSS has been included with every version of Windows since Windows XP SP1. Macrium Reflect cannot cause VSS to fail, it simply uses the service. Any failure is caused by other software or system configuration problems and will affect every program that uses VSS.

What is VSS? VSS is a copy-on-write driver that intercepts disk writes before they actually happen. The current contents of the disk are written to a shadow copy buffer before the write takes place. This enables a disk image to represent an exact point in time and not be affected by disk write activity during image creation.

How do I know that VSS has failed? When VSS fails there will usually be an indication in the image or backup log file.

You will generally see 'Failed to Create Volume Snapshot' followed by a hex result code. The result code is an error code from VSS and sometimes just Googling ‘VSS + Result Code’ will come up with a solution to your VSS problems.

You may also see: Backup aborted! - Unable to open file handle for '\\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopyxxx' - The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

How to solve the problem?

Make sure that the VSS service isn't disabled: changing the startup type of the VSS service and rebooting can often resolve issues.

1. Right click on 'My Computer'.
2. Select 'Manage'.
3. Select the 'Services' tree node.
4. Right click on 'Volume Shadow Copy'
5. Select Properties
6. Change the startup type to 'Automatic'
7. Reboot

Re-register the VSS components. Sometimes re-registering VSS core components can fix errors. Copy the following commands to Notepad and save the file with a ‘.bat’ extension. Run the .bat file by opening a command prompt and entering the .bat file name.

cd /d %windir%\system32
net stop vss
net stop swprv
regsvr32 /s ole32.dll
regsvr32 /s oleaut32.dll
regsvr32 /s vss_ps.dll
vssvc /register
regsvr32 /s /i swprv.dll
regsvr32 /s /i eventcls.dll
regsvr32 /s es.dll
regsvr32 /s stdprov.dll
regsvr32 /s vssui.dll
regsvr32 /s msxml.dll
regsvr32 /s msxml3.dll
regsvr32 /s msxml4.dll
vssvc /register
net start swprv
net start vss