Solved Scheduled Backup and restore failed.

[Yiknaa]

Initially had problems with backup and restore, and found the post : "Low Space on Recovery D" started by 'truedave' to be helpful. After that I decided to download backup and restore to an external hard drive. I bought a Seagate 1TB external drive, and have used that on the 19th and 26th May for a scheduled backup. Both were successful.
But last night the backup failed, and the message was :"Backup did not complete successfully. A shadow copy could not be made for the following reason. Insufficient storage available to create either the shadow copy storage or other shadow copy data. (0x8004231) "
The Seagate is showing freespace of 926 GB, so presumably it should have accepted the 'download' as happened the 2 previous weeks. Am I doing something incorrectly ?
Help and suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[richc46]

Many here, including myself, have found that the back up and restore function is not the best.
I back up my hard drive with this
Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download and my personal documents with karens replicator.
Karen's Replicator
Trust me on this, we can get your back up and restore to work properly, but the two that I suggested will do the job, easy to use and may feel that it is better than the native backup and restore.

 

[Yiknaa]

richc46, Thanking you for your suggestion,and I think I have responded to you in the past. I have heard of the Macrium tool recently, and later today, or tomorrow, I will have a look at that, and also the 2nd tool you have suggested. More than likely, if as you say, they are easy to use and also reliable, I will switch to one or the other.
Getting back to Windows Backup and Restore, why should it work twice to the Seagate external, then the 3rd time fail ? I am not looking to fix it, being a novice on computers, but the reason why, in layman's terms, I would be interested to learn. I tried once more at 1pm today, and got the same message as I quoted above with the following in brackets at end of message (0x800423F)

 

[richc46]

I dont know what it did not work. Its possible that the hard drive is beginning to die. Go to the website of the hard drive manufacturer and see if you can test the hard drive.

 

[Yiknaa]

richc46, The external Seagate hard drive, which I assume you are referring to, ie 'beginning to die', was bought brand new on 10th May, this year. I doubt it can be faulty, but I suppose there is always the possibility of the odd 'duff' one. I will have a look at Seagate's site and see if there is the possibility of testing it.
Thanks.

 

[Yiknaa]

richc46, Still intending to sit down tomorrow with a clear head and try what you suggest. However, re you post is it dying, and my reply that it is new at beginning of May, 2013, just before I finish for tonight, I have connected the Seagate and opened it re contents. I have removed a file stored on it, photos. The file was successfully removed. I then went back to "my files" and moved the same file(which I had just removed from the Seagate)back to the Seagate, and it was replaced there. So I assume that there is nothing wrong or 'dying' with that external hard drive.

 

[richc46]

When a hard drive has problems it begins as small cluster corruption. That sector is not always used, but when it is you may experience problems. To be honest, I do not really think that a problem HD is the cause of your situation, but its a good starting point.

 

[Yiknaa]

richc46, I have followed your suggestion and downloaded/installed Macrium. It is now listed in all programs.

I have again tried in the last hour to backup with the Seagate external, but still no joy, - unable to create a shadow copy, etc. After that I tried with a Kingston 16GB USB flash drive, which has 14 GB free space, and again the same failure warning as when I use the Seagate.

Presumably the Macrium is easy to use, as you have said earlier, so I will only have to go into that program then follow instructions to back up. If you have any tips re using it, please feel free to post.
Thanks,
Yiknaa.

 

[richc46]

Here are instructions from one of our members very familiar with Macrium
Imaging with free Macrium - Windows 7 Help Forums

 

[Yiknaa]

richc46, Downloaded Macrium and it has completed successfully. I now have a file in my documents in a 'Reflect' folder - mybackup (1).xml so I suppose I have done things correctly. I will check out the later help item which you posted 4 hours back.

 

[richc46]

Glad that it was all sorted for you.