Our Veritas Backupexec 9.1 software has died recently and looks to need a full reinstall. I tried a few things with it but all failed over the course of a few days so it was at a critical point that I needed to take a full backup.
I decided to cut my losses with Veritas briefly and fix it at the weekend when the server can afford some down time.
So I turned to NTBackup, all was going well backing up both hard drive partitions and exchange mailstore, I was manually checking the progress throughout the day. I didn't use schedules, scripts or the command line, I managed it all from the NTBackup front end.
I was remotely logged onto the server as administrator to carry out the backup and then logged off at the end of the day. I come in this morning to find the backup log is 0kb in size and no data in it. NTBackup is not running, and the event logs only show the start and end of the first partition backup, the start of the 2nd partition backup and no reference to the finish of the job, the end of the 2nd partition backup or the mailstore.
I'm so confused. Would have thought NTBackup just runs till completion even if run purely from the front end. It certainly looks like it stopped when I logged off and didn't log an event log or update the job log.
I went into NTBackup to restore to check what was catalogged for the backup and it only has the 1st Partition and part of the 2nd partition, no mailstore.
Can anyone confirm that this is what has happened and should I run NTBackup from scripts/schedule/command line to ensure it runs in the background?
Small Business Server 2003 Premium
Cheers
John
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oh no! thanks for that. Gutted it ran all day and then boom, logged off, all gone! Guess I'll just have to fix Veritas tonight as the full backup windows has passed. I've used it in the past for the odd quick backup but never a full backup so was obviously always logged on.
Damn, it would have been so easy just to use the same parameters but scheduled. You live you learn!
Cheers
Actually, the strangest thing has happened. I have just logged back into the server remotely as Administrator, I had logged in previously but nothing was there. Now I have the NTBackup GUI with the Job 3/4 finished asking for another tape! How come this didn't happen earlier?
Problem is it won't let me wipe the next tape to allow it to write to it (tape has veritas data on it)
...it was a complete freak occurance, I've managed to continue the backup due to good luck rather than good management!
I do my admin from a Virtual Machine running on a Mac. So at the end of the day I simply suspend the VM and then continue it the next day. Turns out, I hadn't logged off at all. But this morning I logged onto the server as a second instance of the Administrator user, that instance didn't have ntbackup running, however the original instance was still running and that did. So I managed to deallocate the Veritas data from the tape via computer management, removable disks, libraries and then destroy the data using the FREE parameter.
NTBackup recognised the free tree and has continued the backup!!!
A bizarre turn of events if you ask me. Had I been using a physical computer for maintenance I'd have shut down and therefore subsequently logged off and lost the backup.
I suppose the lack of data in the backup log and the lack of a 2nd partition completion event log meant the backup was still running in the logged in instance of administrator. I must try to understand the remote desktop login instances more as I've never really logged into it twice, any offsite remote control software uses the physical log in rather than the RDP.
Business Accounts
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by: oBdAPosted on 2009-08-07 at 02:05:41ID: 25040952
NTBackup doesn't run as a service. If you start a backup through the GUI, the account you started it with needs to remain logged on until the end of the task.
So if you want to run this unattended, you need to run it through a scheduled task; best would be to create a dedicated user account with the necessary permissions.