Configure Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS)

 For Microsoft 2003/2008/2012 servers, the LiveVault service uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)

If you are Running Windows 2003 Server or Small Business Server 2003, check to see if the following rollup has been applied http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940349/en-us 

If not already installed, apply this update and restart your server before proceeding.

The default setting for VSS is to use all available disk space on the volume, this causes it to consume nearly all available disk space before it begins to purge old snapshots.

To Configure Shadow Copies:

1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. Right-click the local disk you are backing up, and then select Properties.
3. Select the Shadow Copies tab.
4. For each volume:
1. Click Disable.
2. Click Settings, For Maximum Size, select Use Limit and set the size to 10% of the total volume size (in MB), ie. for a 500GB Volume, set the size to 50000MB
5. Open Services, click Start>Run>Services.msc and Verify that the Volume Shadow Copy and Microsoft Shadow Copy services are set to Manual.

Note: If this service is disabled, VSS cannot perform snapshots and LiveVault backups fail.

 Volume Free Space Considerations

 CloudRecover recommends you to keep a Minimum of 15% free disk space on all volumes. This buffer allows sufficient free disk space for VSS to successfully take a snapshot and for the LiveVault software to successfully back up.

Running the Agent on Servers with Multiple VSS Providers

 On servers where additional VSS providers have been installed by other backup products, there is an additional configuration step required in order for the LiveVault agent to function properly.

By default, the LiveVault agent does not specify a particular provider. Instead it allows VSS to determine which provider is appropriate when a snapshot is requested.

If the default Microsoft VSS provider has been overwritten by another product the livevault backups may fail.

If you are unsure if another VSS product is installed or to determine the VSS providers running on a system, A list of GUIDs associated with installed providers can be found by running vssadmin list providers from a command prompt.

You should get an output that looks similar to below:

vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool

 (C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

 Provider name: 'Microsoft Software Shadow Copy provider 1.0'

 Provider type: System

 Provider Id: {b5946137-7b9f-4925-af80-51abd60b20d5}

 Version: 1.0.0.7

If more than one VSS provider is present on your server, you need to configure the LiveVault agent to work with the Microsoft VSS Provider, by following the procedure located at Here