System shutdown waiting for Acronis

I thought about this, but did not test this yet:

you could add the command "TASKKILL /F /IM mms.exe" to the windows task manager and set it to trigger on windows shutdown.
MMS.exe is the "Acronis Managed Machine Service" that performs the backup and prevents the windows shutdown.

Be aware that this will leave a corrupt backup (in case of backup operation) in your vault and I don't know if Acronis or the Storage Node will handle this correctly (-> delete it). In fact: I doubt it. If you backup to unmanaged vaults though, you can delete corrupt TIBs easily.

This may be helpful until QA/Dev realizes that postponing a shutdown for several hours (or - in some cases - forever) might not be a good design decision.

Anyway this "hack" needs some testing e.g. if starting this
via group policy shutdown script
or
via scheduled task triggered by a system event
will do it.

FYI - On our last shutdown-test it was the validation what had hold the UPS-shutdown-process.

But better an unvalidated backup und a securely shutdown system - than a half verified backup and a system shutdown via power outage because of the UPS is running out of battery - remember many UPSes.

And i really don`t want to be the person who must find a solution for a whole environment like Acronis backuped W2k8 + Linux + XEN-Server-VMs
where every one can have its own kind of shutdown-skript / shutdown event - because of this behavior.

Its only a workaround.

For Linux and virtualized environments I'd suggest using a product specialized for the task. Pretty much every Linux-Distribution comes with amanda (and most add bacula as well).

And Acronis has vmProtect - if you trust it.