Found this issue when investigating an error regarding backup of system state on an SBS 2011 server. A colleague mentioned issues he had with Sharepoint and other updates causing backups to fail. When a manual wbadmin job was run with the systemstate option – part of the backup would run but then the remaining steps would fail. After some research it was suggest that PSCONFIG would need to be run (despite having been run before on this server – so was assuming that another update had caused similar problem) and in this case the target of the backup would also have to be a unc share to allow it to complete.
So psconfig first then .. start a dos session with run as administrator
then
PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures
when it completes – check for any errors. – if none proceed with the backup test
wbadmin start systemstatebackup -backuptarget:myservermyshare
where the target is a shared folder on another machine – which I have have already checked I have permissions to create and delete folders and file.
Depending on the size of the system – this could take some time but a progress percentage will be displayed. In my case it took 45 mins and was about 12.5GB.