New Client: Oxford County Community Health Centre

Posted on August 30, 2017August 31, 2017 by Mike Page

Builtbymike.ca IT Services is now providing IT Management services to the Oxford County Community Health Centre (OCCHC) in Woodstock, Tillsonburg and Ingersoll.

Builtbymike will use the same focus that has been working for four years at the Ingersoll Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic to also help the OCCHC get more from their current IT resources while working to decrease the overall IT budget to allow the OCCHC to spend those funds to provide better services to the community.

Please visit the OCCHC website (new website soon to be released) to see the amazing services that they offer to improve the lives and health of the people within our community.

Happy Holidays!

Posted on December 21, 2016December 21, 2016 by Mike Page

Wishing you a happy holiday and a joyful and prosperous year to come!

The end of the year brings me the great joy of being able to acknowledge those who have helped to make a successful year for Builtbymike.ca IT Services. This year has seen many new business and residential clients coming to me for IT services. More importantly to me is that most of my clients have been repeat clients or have found me through word of mouth. This is the best indicator to me that I am providing a great service to my clients.

To help make 2017 an even better year for my business (and your IT service) I ask that you feel free to send comments and suggestions for Builtbymike.ca IT Services to mikepage@builtbymike.ca or if you are willing to have comments posted to my website you can e-mail those as well or visit www.builtbymike.ca/submit-testimonial.

Once again, I can’t thank you enough for your business and support in 2016. Cheers to you!

Backup Exec 2010 VSS Snapshot error

Posted on March 1, 2016April 16, 2016 by Mike Page

VSS Snapshot Error Description

One of my clients was having an issue with Veritas (formally Symantec) Backup Exec with a “VSS Snapshot error”. This problem has many different solutions. The error message is pretty generic for any problem causing the VSS writers in Windows to crash. The error message I received was as follows:

AOFO: Initialization failure on: “Shadow?Copy?Components”. Advanced Open File Option used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

V-79-10000-11226 – VSS Snapshot error. The Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshot provider selected returned: “Unexpected provider error”. Ensure that all provider services are enabled and can be started. Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.

I tried about half a dozen potential solutions to this VSS error. The solutions I tried included:

Adding and removing windows updates and hot fixes
Restarting the server and services within the server
Modifying Windows registry settings
Looking up to the heavens and cursing Backup Exec.

All of these solutions were somewhat complicated. Some of the solutions that included editing Windows registry were also very risky.

The solution that ended up working was one that was posted to the Veritas website shortly after my client began having backup issues. This leads me to believe that something happened around that time with Windows Server or Backup Exec that caused them to become incompatible for VSS Snapshots.

Solution

Go to “Computer” on the server in question and right click a hard disk.
Select “Configure Shadow Copies…”
For each volume select it and click settings.
If maximum size is set to a limit select the radio button for “No limit”.
Click OK and repeat.

Since doing this extremely simple solution I have been able to run backups successfully again. The article referenced below suggested that if the volumes were already set to “No Limit” to add a limited temporarily and then go back and set them again to no limit.

References

The solution for this came from here.

I came across that link through this forum post here.