[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] Volume Shadow copy operation failed for backup volumes with following error code '2155348129' - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Wed, Jul 6 2011 19:32 bradley

Volume Shadow copy operation failed for backup volumes with following error code '2155348129'

Had an interesting VSS problem on a Server 2008 tonight - not R2 mind you.

From the Application log:   Backup started at '7/7/2011 2:01:23 AM' failed as Volume Shadow copy operation failed for backup volumes with following error code '2155348129'. Please rerun backup once issue is resolved.

From the Windows Backup sub log:  Backup started at '{58118b80-d6d9-4e5a-84d4-a3e24864ee32}' failed as Volume Shadow copy operation failed for backup volumes with following error code '2155348129'.

The backups started to fail but with not a lot of hints as to what was wrong.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2009/09/16/diagnosing-failures-in-windows-server-backup-part-1-vss-spp-errors.aspx

That says look at the event logs. That didn't point me in the right direction.  It was the plain old vssadmin list writers that pointed me in the right place.  And it was this blog that made me realize that the temp, turned off, differencing drives XP vhd I had temp stuck on the HyperV box that was causing the problem:  http://www.gilkirkpatrick.com/Blog/post/2008/08/17/Volume-Shadow-Copy-Service-operation-failed2c-error-0x800423f0.aspx 

I deleted the unneeded HyperV vhd in the HyperV manager, restarted the backup and volia... off it went.

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# re: Volume Shadow copy operation failed for backup volumes with following error code '2155348129'

Friday, July 08, 2011 6:07 PM by Chris

What timing - I've been struggling with this error for 3 weeks with the exact same symptoms and error messages.  I've searched high and low but never found a definitive answer.  

Even though I wasn't using differencing drives, I had recently relocated a rarely used VHD to a NAS and updated the VM to point to it.  Even though this VM was turned off, apparently it was still freaking out WSB.  I nuked that VM and WSB was happy again - thanks so much for the pointer in the right direction!