backup4all / windows search indexer

[MiG]

Found out that the windows search indexer service can apparently, even with volume shadow copy, severely disrupt backups (presumably because of file locks), to the point that a B4A job would attempt to copy the same file over and over again indefinitely - as soon as B4A runs into a file that the indexer has locked, things seem to go very wrong. When canceled manually it does report errors, and after a rerun it reports 'completed succesfully' but turns out to have (for example) copied only 10% of the files and a mostly empty directory structure.

The indexing service I've dealt with by starting backup4all with a small batch script (WinXP, should probably work for vista and 7 as well):

Code: Select all

sc stop wsearch
sc config wsearch start= disabled
backup4all.exe
sc start wsearch
sc config wsearch start= auto

First command stops the service, second one sets it to disabled so it won't automagically start again after a while - would be problematic for (lengthy!) full backups / restores. This will also improve performance as you won't get both B4A and the search indexer intensively competing for access to your hard drive.

What still worries me quite a bit here, is that those file locks seem to throw backup4all off somehow, causing it to label a backup as completed succesfully, even though it clearly isn't - there usually is quite a size difference between source and target dirs. The only way I can fix this is by closing B4A, deleting directory and index file (and in case of the portable edition, also the backup index file on the USB drive) and running the entire job again. Otherwise it will keep reporting success on subsequent reruns, even though the target directory is very much incomplete.
Would you mind including an additional check, making it compare *total* byte size of the source and target dirs?

[Adrian (Softland)]

Hi,

Do you still have the backup logs and the catalog for that job? If yes, please send them to support[at]backup4all[dot]com.
Put the files into a zip archive.

[MiG]

Will do.