Backups fails to start, error shows when hovering over taskbar icon but not in GUI

[AlexLeadingEdge]

Ticket # 04320869

At the scheduled backup time Veeam Agent fails to backup. No indication in the GUI that is has failed, just that it hasn't backed up for one or two days, but if I hover over the taskbar icon it says that the backup failed to start. I upgraded from v3 to v4 and it still happens randomly. The last time was 9 days ago, an 8 day gap. Rebooting the server fixes the issue every time but this has happened three times now so I need a solution.

Where would I find the log where I will find information on why the backup failed to start?

I assume it is located under C:\ProgramData\Veeam\Endpoint but there are a lot of logs and I'm not sure which one to start with.

Thank you

[Dima P.]

Hi Alex,

To make sure I got it right: the result of the latest failed session is displayed in the tray but it's not visible in the UI?

Logs are located there, yes, but they are mainly used for troubleshooting by our QA and support engineers (so quite complex), there should be a folder with the text log for the job session with the name of the job and the date (something similar to Job.Backup_Job_Name_HostNameBackup.log).

[AlexLeadingEdge]

Hi Dima,

For some reason I can't "quote" you so I will do it manually...

To make sure I got it right: the result of the latest failed session is displayed in the tray but it's not visible in the UI?

Correct. If I hovered over the tray icon it said backup failed to start, but there was no indication in the GUI of a failed backup, simply that the backup hadn't run since several days earlier. Clicking on the individual backups didn't show any backup failures.

Note the highlighted bit in the picture below, which is two missed backups (Wednesday and Thursday night):

Logs are located there, yes, but they are mainly used for troubleshooting by our QA and support engineers (so quite complex), there should be a folder with the text log for the job session with the name of the job and the date (something similar to Job.Backup_Job_Name_HostNameBackup.log).

I found the log you've mentioned, but from 4/8/2020 to 6/8/2020 there are no logs, which coincides with what I saw in the GUI and the tray icon.

[AlexLeadingEdge]

Hi Dima,

Philip from Veeam Support is on the case

I tried to upload the requested logs to the Veeam SFTP Server but it seems to be non-functional.

[Dima P.]

Thanks for sharing the updates Alex. I suspect that backup job could be sitting in the retry cycle which was eventually resolved next day (thus no failed session logged) but let await for the debug log analysis from support folks. Cheers!

[AlexLeadingEdge]

I haven't had any issues for the past 3 weeks so it seems to have gone away with any intervention, but Veeam Support replied with:

Log Name: System
Source: Win32k
Date: 4/08/2020 11:07:34 PM
...
A desktop heap allocation failed.

This is a symptom of desktop heap exhaustion and means that there is insufficient desktop heap memory to process queries that are required by services running under the local system account (like our backup service).

To alleviate the issue, I would recommend increasing the desktop heap size as per https://www.veeam.com/kb3077 .

The KB addresses managed agent backup however the root cause and resolution is the same for standalone agents.

[Dima P.]

Hello Alex,

Glad to hear that the issue is resolved. Thanks for updating this thread!