I've tried the check disk, system file checker, profiles (this one had a number of entries for the image of UpdatusUser with two of them having a RefCount of 1), I've got an Intel USB controller and even tried giving the reserve partition a drive letter mapping, but while the Windows Backup works on the file backup, the system image looks to be nearly finished, then the drive goes click and stops. Extra Notes: May I also point out this this has been working for months now without a problem and only started 2 days ago. The OS is Win7 x64 Ultimate backing up to an external USB drive over eSata.

How does one also read the etl files? When I open them in the Windows Event Viewer it just shows guids.

I also get the error 0x80070002 "The system cannot find the file specified". The event log also doesn't like which file this is.

I'm wondering also how does one diagnose this sort of problem? If there any tracing tools that I can use to see what it was up to when it errored?

Just another status update I found out that the UpdatusUser is from the NVidia graphics driver updater program. I tried performing a clean install of the driver but the extra profiles still exist. I'm not sure if that makes a difference to the problem.

Hi, I would recommend you to perform the methods mentioned below and check if it helps: 1.Temporarily disable all the third party security programs and boot in Clean Boot to test the issue. 2. If the backup target drive is connected via USB, it could be the USB controller issue. Please see this kb article for more information and the hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976972 3. Error code 0x8100002F and or error code 0x80070002 when you back up files in Windows 7 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979281 If the issue persists, please collect the Event Log for investigate further. Also, zip %SystemDrive%\Windows\Logs\WindowsBackup folder and upload on your SkyDrive and post the link here. ======================== 1. Click "Start", input "eventvwr" (without quotation marks) in the Search bar and press Enter. 2. Right click on "Application" on the left frame, choose "Save Log file As"; in the pop-up window, click to choose the Desktop icon on the left frame, input "app" in the "File name" blank, and then click Save. 3. Right click on "System", with the same method, save it as "sys". 4. Locate the two saved log files on the Desktop and send them to us.Tracy Cai TechNet Community Support

Thanks for the help Tracy, but somehow it's righted itself?!? The only thing I did on Friday was edit the backup job and remove the "create system image". That night (at the scheduled 2am run) the data only backup worked fine. On Saturday, I manually created a system image with a third party tool which worked fine. On Monday, I set the backup job to again include the system image and last night it worked fine. I'll be keeping an eye on it each day for the rest of the week and hopefully the problem is fixed...

The final outcome of this issue ended up being a drive erroring but not fail yet. Check disk reported no problem, but I expect if I did a low level scan it would have found problems. Apparently Windows backup is more sensitive than other backup and imaging software. It was good that I got my data off first, but bad that the backup gave such obscure error messages.