Purpose

This article documents how to manually create a volume shadow copy using the Diskshadow command-line utility in Windows.

Cause

Veeam products use the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for various tasks (e.g., ensuring transactional consistency, triggering truncation for Exchange, and guest level backups with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows.) When Veeam backup jobs fail due to a VSS-related issue, it can be helpful to perform testing outside of the Veeam product to help isolate the problem for further investigation. While Windows Server Backup is generally sufficient for isolation tests (and is often preferred by Microsoft Support), it does not support all possible configurations, nor does it directly correlate to how Veeam utilizes VSS. For that reason, Veeam support recommends isolation testing using the Diskshadow command-line utility, which allows for the closest reproduction of the VSS task Veeam products perform.

Solution

All steps and commands documented in this article are to be performed on the machine with the VSS issue.   This procedure is split into the following sections: Prerequisite Preparation Testing Review Results

Example Errors