Veeam Agent backup job finished with "Collecting recovery media files Details: The system cannot find the file specified" warning

A Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows backup job in Managed by backup server mode finishes with a warning:

Collecting recovery media files Details: The system cannot find the file specified

Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows runs the Recovery Media collection process at the end of the backup job. The process enables Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows to generate the Veeam Recovery Media for the machine.

The Recovery Media collection process is based on the Windows RE/PE components, that may be missing. For example: 

• Starting from Windows 10 version 1809, the WinPE component is an add-on to the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK).
• Veeam Agent machine has a hardware recovery partition instead of the system partition.

As a result, the backup job fails to process the WinRE image and displays the warning.

If the Windows RE status cannot be corrected, as a workaround, the collection of recovery information can be disabled by creating the following registry value on the guest machine.

Key Location: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam EndPoint Backup
Value Name: DisableRECollection
Value Type: DWORD (32-Bit Value)
Value Data: 1

The Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows service must be restarted after creating the registry value.

As noted in the Cause section, the recovery information is used to generate the Veeam Recovery Media. As such, disabling the collection of this information will prevent the creation of Recovery Media from the backup files.