Why would SBS2003 backup throw "The operation was not performed because the specified media cannot be found" error

Question

Our Small-Business-Server 2003 backup job has failed a number of times with the following error:

The operation was not performed because the specified media cannot be found.

The commandline that was run:

Launching NTBackup: ntbackup.exe backup "@C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Small Business Server\Backup\Small Business Backup Script.bks" /d "SBS Backup created on 2011/09/29 at 08:00 PM" /v:yes /r:no /rs:no /hc:off /m normal /j "Small Business Server Backup Job" /l:s /f "F:\Backup Files\Small Business Server Backup (02).bkf" /UM

We had a similar problem before where the job was actually pointing to an incorrect drive, but this has been resolved. The drive, F, is definitely plugged-in and working. It is an external drive.

For some reason the drive is completely full with backups. The backup task is configured to keep only 5 backups, so should get rid of the older ones and be OK for space. Would this cause the error above? (I would expect a "Drive is Full" error if it was a problem)

Answer 1

Looks like this was, in fact, a disk space issue. I configured the backup to store only 3 snapshots instead of 5, and deleted two of the older backups. Problem solved!