The VSS service performs a snapshot cleanup operation during the VSS service startup and the snapshot deletion process. The snapshot cleanup operation deletes aborted snapshots and cleans up other snapshots (such as finds read/write snapshots, and then changes them to read-only snapshots). However, when the snapshot deletion process occurs the cleanup operation may create a race condition that may interfere with the snapshot creation process. In the race condition, the cleanup operation may mark the snapshot as read-only during an auto-recovery process. This behavior causes Hyper-V VSS writer not to auto-recover the snapshot successfully. Therefore, the Hyper-V VSS writer fails in the backup operation.