Conventional File Copy: enabling conventional file copy for open file backups

Accessing Conventional File Copy settings

To access the Conventional File Copy settings shown above:

1. Click Jobs in the navigation bar
2. Select the job to be edited and click Edit at the bottom of the window.
3. Click Open files on the left menu.
4. Click Conventional File Copy to expand the section.

Enabling Conventional File Copy

If no snapshot manager is used, or if you are backing up data on a network share, files that are in use or open during the backup process are skipped and not backed up. BackupAssist offers an alternative to snapshot technology, Conventional File Copy, that, with a multi-phase backup process, attempts to work around the issue of skipped files.

The multi-phase backup process works as follows:

• Phase One
  Selected files and folders are backed up. Open files are skipped by NTBackup. BackupAssist will detect these skipped files and attempt to copy them to a temporary directory. Open files that are locked with a shared lock or no lock at all are successfully copied up using this method (eg. Outlook .pst files). Files that have exclusive locks, however, cannot be copied, and as a consequence cannot be backed up using this method (eg. files from live database applications).
• Phase Two
  Open files that were successfully copied to the temporary location are now backed up to your backup device.

For specific databases such as Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server that have exclusively locked files, you can use the respective BackupAssist modules (built-in Exchange module and the SQL Add-on module) to backup these resources. For all other application data with exclusively locked files, you would need to use a snapshot manager (either VSS or the Advanced Open Files Add-on).
Backing up an Exchange Server
Backing up SQL databases
Selecting a snapshot manager

To enable Conventional File Copy:

1. Check Enable Conventional File Copy.
2. Input or browse for a directory where open files can be copied to temporarily before being backed up.
   • Ensure that this directory does not have any other data files within it. All data in this directory will be deleted once the backup process completes.