Why is W7 Saying Not Enough Backup Space?

pparks1 said:

I'm about 99% sure it's the system reserved partition. The error message says for volumes under 500MB, you need at least 50MB free. Well, the System reserved partition is 100MB...and if you got less than 50MB of free space on it, you will get the error message that you see above.

Right click my computer, Manage, go to Disk Management. Right click on the System Reserved partition at the front. Choose change drive letter and path. Assign it a drive, like X. Then open My Computer and check the Free space. I'd bet a dollar to a donut that you have less than 50MB free.

OK I did that and yes it's 48%.

It says "for volumes under 500MB"??
I want to backup my whole hard drive; about 150GB!

So in that case I'd need 320mb in the system partition, right?

Or does volume mean something else?

(not that I understand what a System Partition is. Searching online has been futile too, as I can't find an explanation in layman's terms what it is or how it works).

sygnus21 said:

When you do your backups through Windows Backup, check to see what drives it's including. My guess is that Windows Backup is including another drive when creating the image. This is where you could be running out of disk space.

Yes, you could be right. I seem to remember two destinations on the list, and the other one could only have been the C drive (in which case, no it definitely would not fit on there, as it's about 2/3 full).

1. Anyone know how to stop it including the C drive (or any other drive)?

2. Can anyone help me with the fact it wants to format my external HDD, and I don't want to lose my old PC's last backup?

3. Why does it want to format it anyway? It's only for backups! I don't have an OS on there or anything.

thanks

Greg S said:

pparks1 said:

I'm about 99% sure it's the system reserved partition. The error message says for volumes under 500MB, you need at least 50MB free. Well, the System reserved partition is 100MB...and if you got less than 50MB of free space on it, you will get the error message that you see above.

Right click my computer, Manage, go to Disk Management. Right click on the System Reserved partition at the front. Choose change drive letter and path. Assign it a drive, like X. Then open My Computer and check the Free space. I'd bet a dollar to a donut that you have less than 50MB free.

Here is an article explaining this exact problem;
Windows 7 Enterprise Backup Image Error 0x80780119 - Microsoft Answers

In my case, the partition just magically cleaned itself up within a few hours and I was able to run backups. What caused it to drop for a period of time under 50MB is still a mystery to me.

And if one doesn't have a System Reserved Partition and gets this error, what would it be then?

See Post #6

"The system reserved partition needs shadow storage space. You can check this in Disk management (right click Computer>Manage>Disk Management) the system reserved (100MB) should be around 70% free. If you've got 50% free or more then this isn't your problem.

But you should also check the VSS space on the storage volume.
From an elevated command prompt
>vssadmin list shadowstorage

will show you the available shadow storage space on your backup volume."

RealGem,
As I indicate above you need to look in Disk management for the small 100MB (sometimes 200MB) partition marked system reserved NOT your main partitions. It should not have a letter assigned to it and will not be visible in Windows explorer.
It's required free space for shadows copies is defined here
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...8WS.10%29.aspx

• Must have enough free space to create shadow copies of the partition.
  
  
  
  • If the partition is less than 500 MB, it must have at least 50 MB of free space.
    
    
  • If the partition is 500 MB or larger, it must have at least 320 MB of free space.
    
    
  • If the partition is larger than 1 gigabyte (GB), we recommend that it should have at least 1 GB free.
    
    
  
  Note We recommend that no other files are placed on the system volume, and we recommend that you discourage end-users from storing files on this partition, to avoid filling up this space.

IF it is a backup volume shadowspace problem, the offending volume should be list in the error message. Then look at what
>vssadmin list shadowstorage
says about that volume. You may need to increase the shadow storage space allocation on that volume.

Windows imaging will insist on imaging both the system reserved (containing the boot manager & BCD) AND your Windows OS partition. Any additional partitions are user selected.

Thanks a lot MJF,

I have now sorted out the External Hard Drive problem (in another thread), so I am able to use SyncbackSE, which I am used to and find a lot more straightforward than Windows backup.

Thank you anyway though. I appreciate your help.

sygnus21 said:

RealGem said:

sygnus21 said:

When you do your backups through Windows Backup, check to see what drives it's including. My guess is that Windows Backup is including another drive when creating the image. This is where you could be running out of disk space.

Yes, you could be right. I seem to remember two destinations on the list, and the other one could only have been the C drive (in which case, no it definitely would not fit on there, as it's about 2/3 full).

1. Anyone know how to stop it including the C drive (or any other drive)?

OK - Are you trying to image (make a copy) of your "C" drive? If so, this is what I'm talking about when I say Windows is "automatically" including drives when making an image. See below....



Notice how Windows Backup "automatically" (as in no choice, thus the grayed out check marks) included my games drive.

My issue with the above example is that there is NO reason whatsoever for my "Games" drive to be included in the image. There are NO boot files/folders on that drive. Yet I can not de-select that drive! Thus the bug!

My point is if you have limited space on the destination drive to place your "C" drive image, and Windows decides to include other drives, if the destination drive doesn't have enough space with the included in the image, you'll get a "not enough space" warning.

If you’re trying to create an image, you need to check to see if the Backup utility included any other drives "automatically"

Is that what you're experiencing???

Yes, I was experiencing that.

But as I say above, I am no longer relying on Windows for backups. But thanks for your reply.

I looked at your photo site btw. Great photos!

Dear RealJem,

This is a long shot, but has a bearing on your problem! Kindly read this article : Not enough space for successful backup(0x81000014). Iam posting an excerpt from the link which has the most relevence.

Quote"
My case is: my volume to be backed up is too full. When doing backup in Vista/Win7/Server 2008/R2, VSS backup is the way to go. While VSS will attempt to allocate free space in the drive being backup for creating shadow copy. This is the default VSS behavior but can be altered by vssadmin.exe utility. Please note elevated priviledge is required for running vssadmin.exe.


So, if the drive you are going to backup is too full, you might hit this problem. That means, even if you have free space in other drive, by default VSS don't know how to leverage them"UNquote.

The EXTN. HDDs come pre-formatted, especially the NTFS ones, it's the partitions you have to make! I have two EXTN.HDDs, one is a Seagate Free Agent Pro 750GB and the other is a Western Digital Portable "elements"1TB and both came formatted!
Regards,
Sreedhav


What were the two methods you tried to create a manual backup, as you mentioned in your first post

RealGem said:

OK I did that and yes it's 48%.

It's 48% full, 48% free, or it has 48MB free. If it's got less than 50MB free...that is your issue....as I have been saying all along.