Paragon Backup and Recovery complains about "VSS specific error"

ricecrispies · 24 Apr 2017

I managed to do create one disk image of my laptop using Paragon Backup and Recovery, but when I try to do new one I get the error "VSS specific error" and an instruction to look at the logs. When I try to look at the logs for the failed attempts to create an image I get a pop-up telling me "File parsing error - wrong or unsupported file format", followed by another saying "File read error - most likely it is a file reading error"

Could someone please either tell me how to get this working or else suggest a free or very cheap alternative (apart from Macrium, which I couldn't get to work either)? Thanks!

cereberus · 24 Apr 2017

ricecrispies said:

I managed to do create one disk image of my laptop using Paragon Backup and Recovery, but when I try to do new one I get the error "VSS specific error" and an instruction to look at the logs. When I try to look at the logs for the failed attempts to create an image I get a pop-up telling me "File parsing error - wrong or unsupported file format", followed by another saying "File read error - most likely it is a file reading error"

Could someone please either tell me how to get this working or else suggest a free or very cheap alternative (apart from Macrium, which I couldn't get to work either)? Thanks!

I am surprised you could not get Macrium to work. Your issue is vss related and Macrium has a "fix vss issues" option. All other tools are likely to have similar issues but two good free tools are AOMEI Backupper and Easeus Todo Backup Free.

You can install Macrium and add a boot entry for it. Then when you want to use it, you reboot into Macrium winpe environment which does not use vss.

ricecrispies · 24 Apr 2017

Thank you! I have started a backup with AOMEI and it seems to be going OK. I won't mark this as solved until I've made sure that the backup has finished and I have managed to create working recovery media.

Am I right to understand that VSS is part of Windows and that therefore I have been up against a shortcoming in the OS (fine though Windows is in many other ways)?

ricecrispies · 24 Apr 2017

By the way, I've just remembered what it was that didn't work for me with Macrium. It was that it couldn't create bootable recovery media for my machine.

cereberus · 24 Apr 2017

ricecrispies said:

By the way, I've just remembered what it was that didn't work for me with Macrium. It was that it couldn't create bootable recovery media for my machine.

That seems very odd. You might have needed to select an earlier Winpe version.

ricecrispies · 24 Apr 2017

cereberus said:

That seems very odd. You might have needed to select an earlier Winpe version.

It was for a laptop that I bought new this year.

cereberus · 24 Apr 2017

ricecrispies said:

It was for a laptop that I bought new this year.

Some laptops have old bioses that do not like winpe 10. Mine did not even like win pe5 but ran ok on winpe 4 and not even two years old.

Storm8873 · 24 Apr 2017

With Paragon you can use it's HotCore in place of Microsoft VSS. That's what I did to solve that problem on one of my PCs. You might have to change your Paragon installation as it's not installed by default.

SIW2 · 24 Apr 2017

YES, Aomei will switch to it's own snapshot driver if vss isn't working.

Paragon also has a driver, can't recall if it is installed automatically, you may need to run the Paragon .msi again, as already mentioned by Storm.

Gordon7 · 03 May 2017

Remember to disable your AV (Win Defender and Smart screen) if you run your image to a external USB drive.
Always run your image program by right-click and "Run as Administrator"

A lot of strange errors are often caused by AV programs interfering with the backup process!