I’ve had an issue where a server hasn’t been backing up for a couple of days and all of the recommended solutions didn’t work. In the end it was a case of trial and error until I managed to get it working.
First thing is to check the Application log and in my case I was receiving event ID 8230. There are plenty of recommended solutions to this problem but none worked for me.
When a backup hangs it can be for a number of reasons but first check to see if the shadow copy writers are available and in an error free state.
Open up command prompt and type: vssadmin list writers
In my case it just sits there doing nothing so something is obviously wrong.
to cut a long story short it was the SharePoint VSS Writer service causing the issue. I must admit I’ve not found the exact reason for this yet but stopping and disabling the service allowed the server backup to run. This does mean that we may not be able to fully recover SharePoint in the future but its no longer used so disabling the service is acceptable in this case.
Once you have stopped and disabled the service you can verify if that was the cause by running the vssadmin command again.
Yay, all of the writers are available again so lets try a backup.
Success! except for the SharePoint writer not working. This means we can still backup the data but without the VSS writer we cant guarantee the database is in a consistent state. If I work out the real fix for this issue ill post an update but if you find the fix please comment below.
