I helped a customer out with a problem recently. They had been running Windows Server Backup on an Exchange 2013 CU3 server. The backups had been configured to “VSS Full” and the scheduled jobs were showing as completing successfully. The only issue was that the mailbox database transaction logs were not be deleted/removed by the backup job. I had a close look at the configured backup options and they looked to be fine.
The only obvious sign that something was wrong (other than the fact that the logs were not being cleared) was that the backup status (Get-MailboxDatabase -Status | fl name, *backup) was not showing a date/time stamp next to LastFullBackup. Instead the date/time stamp indicated that a copy backup had taken place (LastCopyBackup).
After a fair bit of research I found the following had worked for some other people in the same position:
- Open REGEDIT and browse to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v15\Replay\Parameters
- Add a new DWORD value named EnableVSSWriter, and set its value to 0.
- Exit Registry Editor and then restart the Microsoft Exchange Replication service.
This worked for my customer too! It doesn’t appear to be well documented, so I thought I would share it here.