Shadow Protect

[Bigaldoc]

I haven't had any problems with Shadow Protect but for one or two in earlier releases that required some new settings. I do a full image backup every Saturday afternoon and incrementals at 1 am on the other six days. I have a backup job for doing THREE partitions: C: (XP); D: (Vista) and H: (Win7) that are on two different physical drives. They normally backup and do incrementals in that order.

Today, I was running a bit behind in my "prep" work of deleting temp files, and doing my usual CHKDSK of each partition. I had a CHKDSK in process on the H: drive when it came time for Shadow Protect to start the weekly full image. The job FAILED, for all THREE partitions and the only thing I can figure is that it must "look at" all three at the beginning of the job and when it saw a CHKDSK in progress for the H: drive, it failed.

I waited for the CHKDSK to complete and edited the job and it is now running successfully as I type this post. Learn something new every day. When the backup completes I'm gonna check all the settings again to see if it mentions that the backups will be done simultaneously or consecutively. FWIW...

[BobArch2]

Hi Al,

The job FAILED, for all THREE partitions and the only thing I can figure is that it must "look at" all three at the beginning of the job and when it saw a CHKDSK in progress for the H: drive, it failed.

ShadowProtect will open up all scheduled drive backups. Once it is satisfied that the processes will/should be OK (i.e. destination drive(s) available etc.) the backup process will start with a single source. When that source backup is complete, it will start to backup the second source. If you check the Backup History, you'll see where start times for all backups are the same while it goes through the preliminary steps... and then the actual backup will start. Consecutively not simultaneously. My observation is that the smallest of the backups go first followed by the next largest etc.

I waited for the CHKDSK to complete and edited the job and it is now running successfully as I type this post. Learn something new every day. When the backup completes I'm gonna check all the settings again to see if it mentions that the backups will be done simultaneously or consecutively. FWIW...

Considering that ShadowProtect operates at the sector level then it would make sense that a sector based function like CHKDSK will halt SP from continuing. You said that you waited for the CHKDSK operation to complete and then edited the job to start the backup. Not too sure what you edited. However, if you just select the desired Backup task by right clicking on it, you should see the drop down menu where you can select the desired task... Full or Incremental. No need to edit any of the items. Once the process is complete, it will automatically fall back into its normal time pattern.

[Bigaldoc]

Thanks for the insight Bob. The only thing I "edited" was the start time. I changed it from 5 pm to a minute or two in the future. It started and completed just fine AND last night's incremental ran as usual. I just ran into something I had never thought about before.

You ARE right that when you look at the log, it shows all three partitions starting at the same time.. Anyway, I'll not to do that in the future. If I had known, all I would have had to do is change the backup time to something later, giving the CHKDSK time to complete.

I AM STILL a big fan of Shadow Protect. It has never let me down yet and I've used it RECENTLY to restore selected files AND a whole partition. Great product for anyone who's listening!