SMS Site backup not running

SMS writer service does not exist or is not running

Last week I noticed that the SMS_Site_backup component was marked with the red error icon, so I examined what could be wrong.

the description of the component (message id: 5045): site backup could not find the sms writer in the list of writers provided by the VSS.  proceeded by another error (message id : 5060): site backup failed. error: gatherwritermetadata failed. please see smsbkup.log

ok, so what does the smsbkup.log tell us?

at the same time the event 4354 is logged in the application event log:

the first check would be to verify if the service SMS_Site_VSS_writer is running? Yes, it was!

second check would be to verify if the SMS writer is still listed in VSS (use the commandline vssadmin list writers) ?

Hey, it’s not there!

apparently if you restart the service SMS_Site_VSS_writer it will list itself again and the backup will also start again…

but that solution is not something we want to do everyday, don’t we?

so I decided to create a status filter rule with the following configuration:

the startbackup.cmd script contains this:

net.exe stop “SMS_SITE_VSS_WRITER” && net.exe start “SMS_SITE_VSS_WRITER”