Troubleshoot Azure Backup

Updated: June 2, 2015

Applies To: Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1, Windows Server 2012

This topic is designed to help you find the resources and information that you need to resolve issues you encounter when you are working with Microsoft Azure Backup.

  • Installation issues

  • Entire server recovery process

  • Usage issues

  • Files for recovery are not listed

  • Network connectivity issues

  • Additional troubleshooting resources

Installation issues

If you are having difficulty during the installation of the Azure Backup Agent, try the following:

  • Download a new copy of the installer to resolve issues with a possible corrupted download. Even if a copy of the installation executable has worked in the past, there is no guarantee that the installer is not corrupt on the disk on which it resides.

  • Verify that the user account being used to install the Azure Backup Agent is a member of the local Administrator group or has been granted the equivalent permissions.

  • Look at the user permissions and Group Policy settings being applied and determine if the user account that you are using during installation has been explicitly denied the privilege to install programs or has been configured with any other application limitations. If so remove these limitations from the user account prior to downloading the Azure Backup Agent installer file.

  • Check to ensure that the installer is running on an operating system that supports Azure Backup Agent. Azure Backup Agent is only supported Windows ServerĀ® 2012.

  • Check that only one instance of the Azure Backup Agent installer is running on the installation of Windows Server 2012. The installer will fail if more than one installer is running on the server.

Entire server recovery process

If you have to replace an entire server that was protected by Azure Backup due to disaster, hardware failure, or operating system upgrade, you will perform the following steps after the server operating system has been restored:

  1. Install Azure Backup Agent on the Server.

  2. Re-Register the Server with Azure Backup using the same certificate.

  3. Specify the same encryption key as used previously.

  4. Schedule the Backup Policy.

  5. Open the Services control panel and restart the OBEngine service. You can also stop and start the service from within an elevated command prompt using the following commands:

    NET STOP OBENGINE
    NET START OBENGINE
    

Note

If you do not restart the OBEngine service and immediately attempt to use Azure Backup backups will fail unless the OBEngine is restarted. However, the OBEngine is automatically restarted when the Azure Backup Agent is closed and no backup activity occurs for at least 5 minutes.

Usage issues

To troubleshoot general issues while using the Microsoft Azure Backup or Azure Backup Agent, try the following:

  • Review the information presented by the error code(s) given during an operation and try any suggested resolutions for the error. Error and event logs can be found in the Application Event log under WindowsAzureBackup.

  • Ensure that Azure Backup is running by checking the service status in the Services snap-in (services.msc). The service can also be started within an elevated command prompt by typing the command: net start obengine.

Files for recovery are not listed

If you cannot find the file you want to select in the list of the files available for recovery, it is possible that the file catalog is not accessible due to either corruption or an error occurring during the backup that prevented the file metadata from successfully transferring. However, the backups are still present in both of these situations and can be recovered by specifying the relative path to the files as they existed on your server.

The cmdlet New-OBRecoverableItem can be used to create new recoverable items from existing recoverable items by appending a relative path to the existing item, and specifying whether the new item is a directory or a file. When using Windows PowerShell to identify recovery points, run the following cmdlets in order:

  1. Query the recoverable sources using the Get-OBRecoverableSource cmdlet.

  2. Choose one of the recoverable sources to get top level recoverable items using Get-OBRecoverableItem

  3. Append a relative path to this top level recoverable item to get a new recoverable item using the New-OBRecoverableItem cmdlet

If you are going to perform recovery using Windows PowerShell cmdlets, you can pass an array of these recoverable items as a parameter to the Start-OBRecovery cmdlet.

The following example shows how these cmdlets are used together:

$sources = Get-OBRecoverableSource
$rp = Get-OBRecoverableItem $sources[0]
$new_item1 = New-OBRecoverableItem $rp[0] "resources\folder" $TRUE
$new_item2 = New-OBRecoverableItem $rp[0] "resources\folder\file.txt" $FALSE
Start-OBRecovery @($new_item1, $new_item2)

Network connectivity issues

Connection issues may occur in either the Azure subscription authentication process or in the connection to Azure backup vault during a backup or recovery operation. You should troubleshoot general network connectivity on the systems that are experiencing the issues prior to troubleshooting the Azure connection processes.

General network troubleshooting includes performing tasks such as:

  • Check for valid IP addressing scheme on the client with the issue

  • Check general connectivity to the Internet. (For example, can users reach https://www.bing.com?)

  • Check for new firewall or router policies that might be denying connection over port 443.

  • Update the network adapter driver and/or firmware.

  • Check that the network adapter has connectivity to the network.

  • Check that the proxy server is configured correctly.

  • Use tools such as Network Monitor to troubleshoot more advanced network connectivity issues. These tools can help determine where specific data is not being correctly transmitted.

Additional troubleshooting resources

If you have any questions about Azure Backup, go to the discussion forum and post your questions. Someone from our community will help you get your answers.Ā 

We are also developing a wiki for errors and events encountered with Azure Backup. All of our event and error message codes are listed on the Azure Backup Errors and Events List article and each code will get an individual wiki entry. Please contribute your experiences as you encounter specific errors and events.