TI Home 2009: Scheduled backup will run with no one logged on, won't it?
TI Home 2009, build 9796
Windows XP Pro SP3
The Acronis scheduler service runs with the system account and presumably starts at boot time, before any user is logged on.
Since I've been having problems with scheduled backups failing to run, apparently anytime after a "switch user" function has been performed, can I just log out all users, leaving the machine sitting at the login screen, and expect the scheduled backup to run?
If a backup will run in that case, just for good measure I'd probably reboot the machine and simply walk away, just in case there's any debris left from earlier "switch user" operations.
By the time the login screen is up, all of Windows is loaded and most of the services are running too. All that's missing is the user's desktop and anything that specifically supports an individual user.
I can access files on the other machines on my home network that are booted up but sitting at the login screen. I can even start a remote VNC session to them and log in remotely (http://www.realvnc.com/).
So far as I can tell, the Acronis scheduler starts a backup without accessing the desktop and should be able to perform the backup with no one logged on.
I'll find out in about 35 minutes :-)
[By the way, a scheduled task won't require a password unless the user ID it's running as requires a password. My old backups ran under "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" and since that ID doesn't have a password, neither did the scheduled task.]
Very good, hope you're successful.
Bruce
TI Home 2009, build 9796 Windows XP Pro SP3 ... If a backup will run in that case, just for good measure I'd probably reboot the machine and simply walk away, just in case there's any debris left from earlier "switch user" operations.
Well, it worked, mostly.
When I was done last night, I rebooted the machine and walked away, leaving the login screen up.
When I checked this morning, I found that my scheduled backup had run successfully.
However, the "shutdown -s" command that I have in the task to be run after the backup completes did not shut the machine down, although according to the system logs, it did run successfully. This is almost certainly a Windows problem, and I'll have to investigate further.