Backup utility not backing up

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

G'day.
My problem for today is one about backups. I have recently done some backups for an old lady friend but it seems not to have worked like I planned. I used the backup utility in xp pro to make a scheduled incremental backup first thing on monday morning. She told me that it started, popped up a message and then 'quit'.

I've read so much on backup utility in the last week that I'm going blind but I still can't find anything that I might be doing wrong. Two possibilitys that I've come up with are that the full backup is too old (done about two months ago) or I need to save the backup in the same folder as the full backup file.

So far I haven't been able to check the log files as she's on holiday for the weekend but I would like to have an idea for when she gets back.

As always any help appreciated no matter how wacky!!

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Well - the usual question:

What was the "message"?

Harry.

 

I wish I knew Harry. All I got was an email saying that it didn't work and that a message had popped up and the program quit.

 

From the point of shere self-defence: I tend not to do anything until they can provide the error message. I find it saves a *lot* of complications/agravations!

Harry.

 

I would also like to have had the message too Harry but as the old dear is 75 not out and gets panicked rather easily (like if one of her desktop icons gets moved to another place) I can't rely on getting all the information I need all the time.

Anyway, I'll try to get round her place this week and see if I can recreate the problem by scheduling a backup to start in 2 minutes and then see what happens.

 

What work on files has she done? You are using an incremental backup this ONLY backups files that have changed since the last backup. As a pretty heavy user of my laptop (I am doing a degree on it) I don't think I change more that 15 - 20 files a week and they are pretty small ones at that. So IF I were to do a in incremental backup it would take about 3 seconds! Go and sit in front of the PC and watch it.

 

Thanks Sandy. In fact that might just be what is happening. I talked to her tonight and will go around tomorrow, but she told me that "it works for about 30 seconds and the quits".

Well, we'll see what tomorrow brings.

 

Good luck - glad to see I've not forgotten everything I have learned ... Spent the last 3 months doing programming in machine code for my degree and that can be quite scary.

 

er.. your LAST full backup was 2 months ago ? I'm glad I'm not responsible for doing the restores...

thats a lot of incrementals to restore!

 

Not really and that's the problem, there's nothing to restore. I started this setup as we had agrees on this being very temporary. I was to replace or build a pc for her but as she doesn't want the stress of that and one of her friends has managed to get hold of some rambus ram then I'll just be putting that in.

Really though the whole system needs a complete overhaul. The guy who "took care" of her system before was not the brightest spark. There are 3 partitions, 2 of which have an OS installed so I think he cocked up somewhere along the line. He had an imaging program installed to make backups (so it seems) but he never turned up for a year and even after telephone calls he didn't show so in the end the old lady forgot everything he 'showed' her.

Even I made a few wrong assumptions based on how bad everything is.

So, now onto the problem. I went around tonight and it seems that the sheduled backups just didn't take place. I tried sheduling a task for 2 minutes time and sat there watching till it failed. Nothing in the event logs, all the right configs for the backup task etc. Should have worked.

So there I am, sitting there and I notice a comment next to the scheduled task. The column was about 2 letters wide so I had overlooked it. What was there you ask? It told me that the task wouldn't run because of a password error. Doh! But wait, I remember in configuring the task I set it to run under her account (admin) and it doesn't have a password (don't ask, just don't).

So, now I create another admin account, give it a password, run a small backup task using this account and hey presto, it worked. So now I've scheduled 2 tasks, the first is a full backup and the second is a weekly differential backup.

So now onto a very weird observation. When I opened up the scheduled task in the backup utility it automatically showed her account credentials in the run as box. This I understand as she is logged on at the moment. I change the account to the admin account with a password and close up. If I open it again I see her account details there and not the ones I entered. The same thing happens in the scheduled tasks.
Does anyone have a reasonable explanation for this? I've been trying to find out but............

 

Not sure if this explains the behavior Nugg, but it's a good article and it shows you are not alone!

A snippet..

The full article here..
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Windows/Article/ArticleID/23164/23164.html