Windows operating systems

Troubleshooting errors using a VSS trace

Edit online

You can troubleshoot your Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) errors by conducting a VSS trace.

About this task

Perform the following steps to complete a VSS trace:

Procedure

  1. Create a tracing.reg file and change the TraceFile entry to point to a volume that is not going to have a shadow copy created. Use the contents at the bottom of this file to create the file. Note the double-backslash delimiter usage; you must enter \\ as the delimiter for each backslash in the path that you want to specify.
  2. Double-click the file from within Windows Explorer to install tracing.reg.
  3. Reproduce the problem.
  4. Turn off tracing by deleting the “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS\Debug\Tracing” key.

Results

The following contents are displayed in the tracefile.reg registry file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS\Debug\Tracing]
"TraceFile"="c:\\trace.txt"
"TraceLevel"=dword:ffffffff
"TraceEnterExit"=dword:00000001
"TraceToFile"=dword:00000001
"TraceToDebugger"=dword:00000000
"TraceFileLineInfo"=dword:00000001
"TraceForceFlush"=dword:00000000