Thread: Need a little help with backing up my system

I just received a 1TB WD Element external desktop drive to use as a back up storage drive. Windows 7 detects the drive, I can access it, but when I try to run the windows backup utility I get the following error: "A shadow copy can not be created. Please check "VSS" and "SPP" application event logs for more info. Details: Insufficient Storage available to create either the shadow copy storage file or other shadow copy data." Now the external drive is completly empty so I do not understand why it's saying there is insufficient storage. Any insight would be great at this point. The web isn't providing me with much of anything that is helpful.

Loki,

I have no idea what your error message means; I also found little of help online with a quick web search.

Until someone else chimes in with an answer to your specific question, I would suggest you utilize a disk imaging program. My personal favorite is Macrium Reflect; I use the paid version, but the free version is quite full featured ( the paid version allows more flexibility with scheduled backups). With this program, you can completely image your hard drives; if something buggers your OS or your program installs, you can boot into a CD or DVD (which you burn) and restore the disk image. It has saved my butt more than once. It also allows you to restore specific files from the image.

If you're interested, you can get it here: Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

How big is the internal drive? If you are trying to create a backup image of the drive, I believe the backup drive needs to be the same size or larger than the drive you are backing up.

You may have a lot of "free space" on your current drive, but windows does not allocate all data on your drive in a manner that all free space is located in a single chunk. Hence, degragging your drive.

My internal drive is also 1TB with under a 100megs used. I have tried to reformat the external drive with no change. Everything I read on the Western Digitals site says it's a windows issue and to contact them. Could it be something with the hidden boot partition for the ecternal drive?

Originally Posted by Viktor_Olin

Loki,

I have no idea what your error message means; I also found little of help online with a quick web search.

Until someone else chimes in with an answer to your specific question, I would suggest you utilize a disk imaging program. My personal favorite is Macrium Reflect; I use the paid version, but the free version is quite full featured ( the paid version allows more flexibility with scheduled backups). With this program, you can completely image your hard drives; if something buggers your OS or your program installs, you can boot into a CD or DVD (which you burn) and restore the disk image. It has saved my butt more than once. It also allows you to restore specific files from the image.

If you're interested, you can get it here: Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

If I cannot get windows backup to work I may very well have to use something like this.

try formatting the drive, do not create any partitions and give it a go.

Not sure if your Google Fu found this, but mine did:

windows 7 backup error "shadow copy could not be created"

The very last answer in the thread is key.

Originally Posted by WileECyte

Not sure if your Google Fu found this, but mine did:

windows 7 backup error "shadow copy could not be created"

The very last answer in the thread is key.

Success. It seems win7 doesn't set up enough space in the hidden boot partition to allow a shadow copy to be made. By expanding that partition you can get the windows backup program to work. Thanks for the help guys!