www.aiscl.co.uk

I have 3 backup scripts set to run at 02:30 every day. This morning at 6:45 I went to check on their status, and didn't have my email report, so I tried to start AISBackup, but it wouldn't run. I went to Task Manager and found that AISBackup was currently running, though it had only consumed 0:00:01 CPU. I killed this process and started AISBackup to check the log files. The logs showed no backup activity from this morning. The backups are set to a local harddrive destination.

Here's the output from the Command Line Generator:

"F:\Program Files\Aquarius IS Consultancy\AISBackup\AISBACKUP.exe" Kevin|O Andrea|O Kids|O

Here's the setting from task scheduler:

AISBACKUP - Kevin Andre Kids
At 2:30 AM every Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun
of every week, starting 8/30/2002
Last Run Time: 2:30:00 AM 8/30/2002
Last Result: 0x1

If I drop the | and the options that follow, the problem seems to go away. Running the program from the command line with the | options present gives the error 'unknown command O'. I'm guessing Windows 2000 command line is interpretting the | character?

The following refers to running AISBackup via the MS Task Scheduler under Windows NT, 2000 or XP.

I have double checked the running of scripts on Windows 2000 and all is okay (here at least). The following guidelines may help:

If there are additional parameters with a script there must not be any spaces in the parameter block, if the script name contains a space the whole parameter block must be enclosed in quotes. Each script parameter block is separated from each other by one space. The ‘Auto Running AISBackup’ Command Line Generator does this for you.

On Windows NT, 2000 & XP you must use an account that has got a password, a null password will not work. Home users of these operating system’s may not wish to password protect their regular account, here set-up a ‘Backup’ account that has got a password. Please ensure that you manually test the running of AISBackup in the ‘Backup’ account as AISBackup will be running invisibly behind the scenes.

To check that a scheduled job has executed check the AISBackup log, MS Task Scheduler log (menu option Advanced / View Log). The most recent entry is at the end of the log. You can also watch the AISBackup task running in the task manager / processes screen (Ctrl , Alt & Delete).

Only one copy of AISBackup can run at a time, if for some reason there is a ‘stuck’ AISBackup running under a different account this will show up in the task manager (Ctrl, Alt & Delete). If you do find a ‘stuck’ AISBackup log into the appropriate account, abort the task and run AISBackup with the same auto run parameters via Windows Start / Run command line to ascertain what the problem is.

We are going to remove the default ‘Run Script Once Per Day’ from the next release of AISBackup as this is only really applicable to running scripts via the start-up group.

It looks like the problem might be in how I have Windows 2000 logins set up. I have the OS set to always assume my user is logged in (this account has administrator privileges). When I set up task scheduler, I specified to use my 'administrator' account. When I changed this to use my user login, the problem goes away.

Just a heads up. Always run this as administrator. That did it for me.