ConfigMgr site backup issue – error code: 53

Timmy Andersson

2 years ago

Here’s an issue I’ve encountered which I was not able to find any documentation on or other posts on how to solve it. If you are using the built in (SCCM) ConfigMgr site backup maintenance job “Backup site Server” and the job starts failing with a specific error code that I will cover in this post this will hopefully help you.

In the console the first thing that tells you that the site backup has failed is shown in the Alerts pane. The alert it self wont really tell you anything around what caused it or what to do about it. Next step would be to start looking at 2 specific logfiles.

Logfiles

The ones we want to look at is smsbackup.log and smswriter.log

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/configmgr/core/plan-design/hierarchy/log-files#BKMK_BnRLog

smsbackup.log

smswriter.log

In this specific scenario, here’s the error code that got generated each the backup ran and this was also the first clue to what was wrong.

Unable to connect to registry containing \CM01.TIMMYIT.ORG\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\SMS (Error= – [error code: 53, error message: The network path was not found.]).

Error: Failed to include \CM01.TIMMYIT.ORG\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\SMS – D:\Program Files\Microsoft Configuration Manager\BackupTemp\SMSbkSiteRegSMS.dat into the metadata.

Building meta data failed.

Solution

The issue I found was that the service “Remote Registry” had for some reason been disabled. Though I could not find any documentation on that it was needed it made sense when looking at the error message and the fact that the backup component were not able to connect to the registry path over the network even though its a local path for the system.

I enabled the service and configured it to its default behavior to automatically start with a delay.

As soon as the service was back running and the Backup job started (which you can do by just starting the backup service) the backup completed without any issues.