SBS Backup Failure – Something Different This Time
ByA client contacted me this week with an error in his SBS backup job. Before I connected to his server, I did a lookup on all the common SBS backup errors by
searching on Susan Bradley’s blog. Once I got connected, though, I found a different error than I had previously encountered, so I had some real troubleshooting to do.
The specific error listed in the SBS backup log was:
spIEnumWbemClassObject->Next failed. (0×80041001)
The success or failure of this backup could not be confirmed. Ensure the Windows Management Instrumentation service is started and try to backup again.
GetResultFromEvents failed. (0×80041001)
NTBackup finished the backup with errors. For more information about failed backups, see the article on troubleshooting your backup at the following Web page: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=18414
The remainder of the backup log seemed to indicate that the backup had completed successfully, including the verification of all four components of the backup process. But the daily monitoring e-mail indicated that the backup had failed, and that’s why the business owner contacted me.
So I did a quick Google on the error, and the few group postings that had anything to do with the error code didn’t match the scenario. I did a few more search variants trying to find anything related to SBS or backups and came up dry again.
That was when I took another look at the error (which was listed in the last 5 logs that had failed) and that’s when I read the following a little more carefully:
“The success or failure of this backup could not be confirmed. Ensure the Windows Management Instrumentation service is started and try to backup again.”
Hm. The error log told me to check and see if the WMI service was running. I looked. It wasn’t. I started it. It came up successfully.
The next night, and every night since, the backup has completed successfully and reported as much.
Sometimes, you have to look beyond the error codes and see what the message is actually telling you. We’re generally so conditioned to get the specific error codes and look those up to find out what’s actually going on that we often don’t look at the supporting information which, in this case, told me exactly what was going on if I had just bothered to look at it.
Still, I’ve now added some data to the Internet that will hopefully help the next person who encounters this error and follows the same process I did. Maybe this will save you a litle bit of time.