Shadow copies failing

  • Article

Published : April 8, 2005 | Updated : August 17, 2005

Summary

This alert is generated when more than 20 percent of the shadow copy jobs attempted for the specified volume during the past two weeks have failed. This rate of shadow copy job failures could compromise protection of your data.

Causes

Shadow copy job failures can be caused by issues with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), by insufficient disk space allocated in the storage pool, by an inconsistent replica, or by synchronization failures.

Note

When synchronization fails for a replica, the subsequent shadow copy job also fails. A shadow copy is only created if the replica has changed since the last shadow copy.

Resolutions

Review the alert details, determine why shadow copy jobs are failing, and take the appropriate action.

  1. From the Alerts tab in the Monitoring task area, check for a Disk threshold exceeded alert.

  2. If a “Disk threshold exceeded” alert exists, review the details and perform the recommended action.

  3. If there is no “Disk threshold exceeded” alert, compare the disk space used to the disk space allocated for the associated replica and shadow copies. For information about disk usage data, see the Disk Utilization Report.

  4. In the Disk Utilization Report, if the “Disk Used” size is nearly as large as the “Disk Allocated” size, the space allocated for the replica and shadow copy volumes is nearly full. You should increase the disk space allocated for the replica. For more information, see How to modify disk allocation.

  1. From the Alerts tab in the Monitoring task area, check for a “Replica is inconsistent” alert.

  2. If a “Replica is inconsistent” alert exists, you must synchronize the replica with consistency check.

  1. Investigate the pattern of synchronization job failures. For information about analyzing trends in synchronization jobs, see the Synchronization Report.

  2. Identify and resolve issues related to specific synchronization failures. For information about a specific synchronization job, review the job details in the Monitoring task area.

DPM automatically resolves this alert when the failure rate of shadow copy jobs falls below 20 percent.