I recently had a server that had Windows Backup failing with the error (0x8004231F) “There is not enough disk space to create the volume shadow copy on the storage location”

All the hard drives appeared to have plenty of space and the backup drives were new and also had plenty of space.

I deceided to try and run the backup from the command line and while this also errored it gave a bit more detail

Error code 0x8004231f

We also get further detail about the space issue being related to volume shadow copy.

I opened up disk manager and checked each volume and found that the Recovery Partition and EFI System Partition did not have Volume Shadow Copy enabled. I enabled it successfully on the Recovery Partition but EFI System Partition gave an error warning there is not enough space.

From the screenshot above (Command Prompt Backup Error 2) you can see that for a volume under 500 Mb (EFI System Partition is 99Mb) the minimum requirement is 50 Mb free. In disk manager it shows that the EFI System Partition has 99Mb free (100%).

I removed the Bare Metal backup (and hence EFI System Partition) from the backup selection and the backup runs successfully.

The problem is we really need the Bare Metal backup option.

OK, so back to the Shadow Copy settings. When looking in the Shadow Copy setting it shows that there is only 30 Mb free on the EFI System Partiton.

The solution in this case for error 0x8004231f is to move the location of the Shadow Copies to another drive for the EFI System Partition.

I hope this helps you out if you’re getting this error, if it does let me know in the comments below,

Thanks

Ian