Hyper-V Backup Pulls Windows Server 2012 into Saved State

Backing up a Hyper-V virtual machine running Windows Server 2012 (or R2) on a Window Server 2008 R2 host may cause the VM to go into a Saved State. This is due to  a Hyper-V limitation and not an issue with the HyperV Backup Software being used.

Please check the following:

Make sure the host as well as all guest OSes are up-to-date with Windows Update first.

Then, check this article and automatically (or manually) check the Hyper-V Integration Services version.

If the Hyper-V Integration Services versions do not match between host and guest, the Hyper-V backups won’t work properly.

Beyond that check

1. Volume Snapshot Integration Service is installed and available (not disabled)
2. there are no dynamic disks inside the VM
3. there are only NTFS volumes inside the VM
4. If you have a cluster setup, the Cluster Resource Group is offline
5. The VM is actually running
6. Using vssadmin or vssuirun.exe, check that there are no ShadowStorage assignments of a volume inside the virtual machine that are set to a different volume than the volume itself. For example, a volume could allocate its VSS storage are for C: on D:. That’s not supported for Hyper-V live backup
7. An App-V drive is installed inside the VM and created a non-NTFS partition.

You can also try to create a registry key inside the Windows Server 2012 VM:

Create the key:	HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore 

And set/add the REG_DWORD "ScopeSnapshots" to zero (0x00)

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