I'm testing Vail connector on one of my systems. Dual boot WinXP Pro SP3 and Win7 X64. Each OS is on its own drive and I use the BIOS boot menu (F12) to control startup.
XP is still connected to the original WHS. Win7 is connected to the Vail test server. On the Win7 system power management is set to not wake the computer for backup. Vail connector still wants to initiate a backup when the Win7 computer is active.
In fact, after the original backup was completed a few stealth backups took place that I didn't even realize had happened. Under the original WHS and XP I always received a notification that a backup would start in 5 mins. Then I could cancel
it. I could control when backups took place by starting a manual backup when I wanted. This is my video editing/gaming computer and I want to be able to control the timing of backups.
For example, yesterday on the Win7 system I was doing a 45min. video capture to Pinnacle Studio 12 of DV-AVI video through a firewire connection. Apparently during this process a backup was attemped which failed (based on the timestamp).
In an ideal scenario this is what happened. A backup was initiated by Vail connector. VSS communicated to the VSS writers that it wanted to take a volume snapshot. Studio 12 is VSS aware. Studio 12 responded, no can do, I'm in the process
of capturing video and writing to the file system. If I do cleanup and quiesce for a volume snapshot I'll drop hundreds, maybe thousands of frames.
When VSS is notified that not all the VSS writers can do what's necessary to guarantee the intergrity of the volume it aborts the volume snapshot and the backup fails.
I have no idea if this is what actually happened. Or for that matter that this is even how VSS works. Later on I did a manual backup which was successful.
I want the option to be able to do manual backups for one of my computers and control when they take place.