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VSS Writer Service Question

  • February 2, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    #134311

    I recently started running Norton Ghost on my PC in order to back it up on a nightly basis. For the last two nights I received the following error:

    COM Surrogate has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience

    According to my Symantec the only way to fix this is to disable the VSS Writer service service.

    Is Symantec correct? Can I turn off this service without any negative affects?

    Thanks

  • February 2, 2009 at 2:51 pm

    #936756

    Of course it depends if any of your applications have dependencies on this. Generally, if you know what databases need backing up, you can always schedule a job for this, the backup program will then be able to access the bak files the job creates, just not the actual datafiles via the VSS service.

    Mike

  • February 3, 2009 at 9:10 am

    #937230

    mikefle (2/2/2009)

    Of course it depends if any of your applications have dependencies on this. Generally, if you know what databases need backing up, you can always schedule a job for this, the backup program will then be able to access the bak files the job creates, just not the actual datafiles via the VSS service.

    Mike

    Sorry to sound a little dense (I am not a DBA and my company doesn't have a DBA). I have two questions:

    1. Am I correct that turning off this service will only affect a backup done of the SQL Server databases on my local PC (I don't want to affect SQL Server backups running on other servers).

    2. If I decided to run a backup on my local machine after turning off this service won't I be missing important stuff if I don't have the actual datafiles from the VSS service?

    Thanks

  • February 3, 2009 at 1:40 pm

    #937532

    Yes, this should only affect your local PC.

    This service allows programs to backup SQL databases, running on the local machine, without stopping the database engine. So if there are things running on your local machine, that use SQL express, they may not get backed up as they were before.

  • February 3, 2009 at 2:15 pm

    #937557

    Thanks so much.

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