SMS.1904 Failed to Create a Snapshot for the Windows Server

Symptom

During the migration, the message "SMS.1904 Failed to create a snapshot for the Windows server" was reported.

Possible Causes

Before data migration, Windows uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to create a snapshot, ensuring that all data is consistent as of a single point in time. This will fail under any of the following conditions:

• The available disk space on the source server is insufficient.
• The VSS of the source server is faulty.

Solution

1. Check the available disk space on the source server. Partitions of 600 MB or larger require at least 320 MB free. Partitions smaller than 600 MB require at least 40 MB free.
   • If there is no sufficient space, clear the space and restart the migration task.
   • If there is sufficient space, go to the next step.

2. Go to the Agent configuration directory on the source server.
   • Windows Agent (Python 3)

     C:\SMS-Agent-Py3\config.

   • Windows Agent (Python 2)

     C:\SMS-Agent-Py2\config

3. Open the g-property.cfg file and change the value of enablesnapshot to False, as shown in Figure 1.

   Restart the migration task. The migration task will skip snapshot creation.

   

   If you skip snapshot creation, data on the source and target servers may be inconsistent, causing services on the target server to fail to start. To resolve this, stop all services on the source server during a maintenance window and perform a final data synchronization to ensure point-in-time consistency.

   Figure 1 Modifying the configuration parameter