VSS is Micrsoft's snapshot service. It is very powerful, but has many failure modes making it hard to diagnose the cause of errors.
Any VSS error will cause the backup to fail with Backup aborted! - Failed to create volume snapshot error.
Note that on some 32 bit systems, Reflect will fall back to the paramount snapshot component pssnap. This will be noted in the log, the snapshot and backup will still be valid.
Getting detailed error information
Version 5 will report extended VSS error information by default.
For Version 4, to get the extended VSS information, you need to run the backup from a VBScript file? Right on your XML definition and select 'Generate VBScript'. Accept the defaults and run the VBScript source. To run VBScript, click the VBSCript tab, right click on the file and select 'Execute'. Once run, a detailed log file will be created in the same directory as the VBScript source. The log file name will be 'log-<date>-<time>.txt'. Open the log file with notepad or similar
Locate the VSS error information and search our knowledge base for further advice or contact us if you don't find a resolution.
Reporting your VSS issue
If you are going to contact us, please attach the log file to your message, as follows.
v4:
Attached the vbs log file generated as described above to your message.
v5:
Select the Log tab located beneath the main toolbar.
Select the log file to be sent and right click on it.
Select the option to submit the log to Macrium Support. You will be given a case number.
Extended logging
We may also ask you to turn on extended VSS logging by setting the following registry key.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Macrium\Reflect]
"VSSLogging"=dword:00000001
Delete the value to disable logging afterwards.