Windows Backup not showing Messages and Jobs, but is running?

Another weird one today….   Windows Backup on Server 2012 R2 was showing me this:

nobackupmessages

Notice how the “Last Backup” shows nothing, and also the Messages at the top are blank?    Well, this was the case even though the backups were running perfectly in the background.   I opened a Microsoft case on this one, because I thought it would be something simple…   but unfortunately it seems they could only find one other case of this issue on 2008 server, not the same as my situation.

In no particular order, we tried Reinstalling Windows Backup, Removing all Windows Backup Cache and Resetting all backups, reformatting the drive,  but none of this worked.    The Microsoft tech’s went away to research the logs, and while they were gone, I thought I would try something else…..

I decided to take the external dedicated USB drive I was backing up to, reformat, and this time partition and assign a drive letter.    I then configured the backup to use an actual Volume (drive letter) as opposed to a dedicated drive for backup.   Low and behold, this fixed everything!    I am still not sure why, but hey, the workaround works!

  6 Replies to “Windows Backup not showing Messages and Jobs, but is running?”

    • Shashank
      January 21, 2016 at 1:19 pm

      Could you share details on it. If it worked or not.

  1. April 3, 2017 at 6:24 am

    I had the same issue but noticed the timestamps in Windows event logs were weird. I fixed it by clearing the following log: Applications and Service Logs / Microsoft / Windows / Backup / Operational

  2. March 5, 2019 at 5:49 pm

    Clearing cache files for the sanin solved the issue for me.

  3. Kostadin Dimov
    August 2, 2019 at 9:51 am

    This happened to a w2k19 machine. I remember only initializing the disk I setup for the backups and not creating a volume out of it. Messages pane in wbadmin was empty just the same. I have cleared the event logs, just like Dan did, although there were no weird time stamps or anything else out of order there. Ran a manual backup and the pane populated fine this time. No idea why this happened on a newly setup machine. Will wait and see if this continues to work fine after the nightly backup tonight.

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