Hallo all:
I am volunteering in a small public library. We have 2 Windows PCs and an Ethernet NAS, where the backups are stored.
The library software uses a Gupta SQLBase database server. You need to stop the related Windows service before backing its files up. I am relatively new to the library, so I do not know more details yet. I guess there is a way to back up the database whilst still online with some clever SQL statement, but there is more software and more data on the PCs to backup anyway.
Years ago, the IT guy bought both Acronis True Image licenses and set up a full disk backup on shutdown. That has been working fine for years. But in the last months, both PCs randomly hang on shutdown, so I am looking for an alternative solution, because this commercial software has other issues too.
I am guessing that Duplicati has no easy, GUI way to run on shutdown, or does it? I found some forum questions, but nothing definitive on this.
I guess I could always use the Windows scheduler to run a task on shutdown, but I am worried whether such a backup would be consistent. If the backup happens before the database service has stopped, or while it is being stopped, the backups cannot be trusted. I wonder whether network services and so on are still available during shutdown for Duplicati to transfer the files.
An automated backup on shutdown is highly desirable. The library only opens a few hours per week, so the PCs are shutdown often. Library staff is exclusively made up of volunteers with no special IT abilities. Manually shutting down the database service before a backup means interrupting library operations. The unpaid staff is unwilling to do more manual tasks, and are prompt to leave the library at the end of the short opening hours. With the current backup solution, they leave the PCs shutting down, and they power themselves off after the backup is completed. Only the small NAS remains on.
Duplicati can apparently use Windows Volume Shadow Copies / Volume Snapshot Service. I do not think that Gupta SQLBase provides a VSS writer for it. Even if it did, the next software probably will not.
Unfortunately, I could not find any way to create a VSS snapshot late on shutdown or early on startup, or at a given time (say midnight, when the PCs are always off). Backing up files that are normally in use seems hard, or maybe I have not found the right documentation yet.
Backing up on shutdown would not be necessary if there no currently-open files. What I really need is to take a VSS snapshot from the filesystem at the time the computer is off (that is, between shutdown and restart). This way, no service or application can have any file open, and the backup would then be clean if the source is that VSS snapshot.
The future of VSS does not look rosy anyway. It looks like Windows 10 is replacing Volume Shadow Copies with a new feature called “File History”. Can Duplicati use it? Would it be possible to select the file history in the period that the PC was shutdown? This way, no files would have been open in this period.
Many thanks in advance,
rdiez