Issue

Lately we’ve been getting a lot of inquiries regarding Azure Backup. One customer tried to set up the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services (MARS) agent. When attempting to run a backup, they experienced an issue where the backup job immediately fails with the following symptoms:

1. In Microsoft Azure Backup, you have a backup job that fails immediately with the following error:

Backup cannot be completed. Error: Operation failed.

The Error tab on the Job Details dialog will also contain the following:

Job failed with error (Operation failed. (0x1D4C2))

2. The CloudBackup Event Log contains an Event ID 11 similar to the one below:

Log Name:         CloudBackup
Source:           CloudBackup
Date:             
Event ID:         11
Task Category:    None
Level:            Error
Keywords:
User:             SYSTEM
Computer:         
Description:

The backup operation has completed with errors.

Cause

This issue typically occurs due to a double backslash (“\\”) in the scratch location path in the registry.

HLKM\Software\Microsoft \Windows Azure Backup\Config\ScratchLocation

and:

HLKM\Software\Microsoft \Windows Azure Backup\Config\CloudBackupProvider\ScratchLocation

Resolution

Here are the steps to solve this issue:

1. Run Regedit.

2. Navigate to the following Registry keys:

HLKM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Azure Backup\Config\
HLKM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Azure Backup\Config\CloudBackupProvider\

3. In each registry key above, double-click the ScratchLocation value and remove the extra “\” in the path, or modify the path to reflect the correct location.

4. Once both registry keys have been edited, click OK and then rerun the backup. At this point the backup job should complete successfully.