Incompatible version of the serializing package

[Ann Kennedy]

I've been running Vista Ultimate since May and have had no issues with
backup and restore until the last one. My last successful backup was
December 1. The error message started appearing then, and I have followed
all the steps in kb/940970/en-us. No joy. Resizing with vssadmin seems to
work, but the next time I try to backup or restore or delete a shadow copy,
I get error message 0x80070724 and the error message on the subject line.

Okay, so this is a known problem for Vista Ultimate, but surely someone
knows how to fix this. Does anyone know what I did to cause this, or was it
in a hot fix I downloaded from Windows Update?

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

Ann

The following article addresses this error and the resolution.

Error message when you try to perform a file backup operation or a system
restore operation in Windows Vista: "Incompatible version of the serializing
package. (0x80070724)":
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940970/en-us

 

[Ann Kennedy]

Thank you for your response. I did not post until after I had read the
knowledge base article you are giving me, and performed all of the tasks
(four times) listed in it. The result was that although the shadow copy
maxfile size was reset, this did not get rid of the error. At this point I
am unable to use neither the Backup nor Restore functions. Is there a step
two that I am missing? I still have no resolution.

 

[Ken O.]

Ann,

Had the same problem with the same results after following instructions of
kb940970 to repair. Found a little more info in another post that made it
work. You must do the fix on all Volumes/HDD's for it to work, use the
"vssadmin list volumes" cmd 1st and do the fix for all drives that return a
shadowstorage size. I have 4 drives, 2 of which had shadowstorage files,
once I reset both of them (not just the c: drive) the fix woked. Hope it
works for you as well.

Ken
Just a dumb XP / Vista user

 

[Ann Kennedy]

Ken, thank you so much. There was a second volume I didn't get, but I did
find my way back to being able to create backups. Haven't yet tested the
Restore part of that, though. I solved my problem by first trying to
eliminate disk errors, and then lastly by reformatting the storage volume to
which I had been writing my backups. Everything was fine after the
reformat.

There's one more thing that might have a bearing. I had been asked to
install the Acronis backup package just prior to this problem arising. I
installed Acronis and then made a backup with it onto the volume I had been
using for the Vista Backup and was unable to use the Vista Backup after
that.. I'm wondering if making a backup with another program to the same
disk overwrites or destroys something. In any case, I'm not doing that
again.

 

[R. C. White]

Once again, a thread that was started in another forum (TechArena this
time?) has migrated to the Microsoft Communities with no context whatsoever.
:>( We are getting in the middle of the story with no way to make sense of
it.

All we can do here is ignore it.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2008 in Vista Ultimate x64 SP1)