That sounds ok so far, but have a look at Perry Whittle's Stairway to AlwaysOn for a bit more background. Step 8 might be of interest.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/stairway/112556/

Congratulations!

Hah, I chose the most outlandish answer, and it was correct.

I've lost a few settings recently but it coincided with my installing Visual Studio, and there seems to be a known issue with that.

Ah, thanks for answering. I assumed it must be a vendor thing.

Is there any particular reason you're on that specific patch level (rather than SP2 CU1)? It might not matter, I'm just interested.

Oh, wow :-D.

Talk to whoever is taking the backups. They will probably be able to amend them to ensure that they don't take backups of your databases. Either that or they could...

Does this help?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/928518

What would you say based on your own experience?

I don't think that's right; your VSS backup does appear to be taking a SQL backup. That's what this indicates:

This is why you can't restore that backup through SQL Server.

Check...

If they're using a 3rd party tool (e.g. TSM, NetBackup) to take the backups, you'd need to use the same tool to restore those backups.

It would be a good...

As Sue says above, this indicates that 3rd party backups are being taken; do your sysadmins use netbackup or something like...

Yes. What have you tried so far?

Is it happening at a...

No. There is only one writeable database.