JkDefrag conflict with NTBackup?

[Theo]

Hello to all.
We use the jkDefrag 3.34 (parameters -q -l) for many months every day on several Windows 2003 32bit SP2 servers (dual core, 4GB) and we had no problem. The last month we have the following problem. The ntbackup starts a full backup of all machines at night and everything goes ok for many machines and drives.  At 07:00 in the morning we schedule the jkdefrag and after 4 minutes ntbackup stops backing up and exits with the folowing error in the log of the NTBackup:

"Error: Could not access or create backup catalog files.  Verify that you have full access to the working folder and there is disk space available.
The operation was ended.
Backup completed on 10/09/2008 at 07:04
The operation did not successfully complete."

Now if we open the jkdefrag log and go at the 07:04 time we see:

"07:03:13   Fragments       Bytes  Clusters Name
07:03:13           1  1139789072    278269 I:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\catalogs51\363A8403.V01
07:03:13           1    69083284     16867 I:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\catalogs51\3751B868.V01
07:03:13           1    67089104     16380 I:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\catalogs51\385AB90B.V01"

some files in the catalogs51 folder are also reported as unmovable
the ntbackup log file called backup07.log remains in two fragments

So it looks like the jkdefrag at that time is working with the catalog folder.


Do you think that this is the reason of the problem and how can we solve it?
(btw I do not see anything in the change log for 3.35 and 3.36 that points to this problem)

Looking back through our backup log files, we had some more problems with ntbackup not completing the backup, always in the period right after 07:00 in the morning, but jkdefrag was working on the drive with the ntbackup log files and catalogs 10 minutes
before the ntbackup program reported it could not continue.



Thanks

[jeroen]

I did not know that NTBackup would crash if JkDefrag is busy with it's catalog. JkDefrag must read-loack a file in order to defragment or optimize it, and apparently NTBackup does not like that. To avoid the problem you could use the JkDefrag "-e" commandline option to ignore the catalogs, or better still make sure that JkDefrag and NTBackup do not run at the same time. I use a tiny little .bat file to run one after another.

p.s. NTBackup will finish quicker if you run JkDefrag first.

[Defrikker]

i run my nightly backup, av scan and jkdefrag from BATs that check for the other apps running so they don't step over each other's toes.  having multiple apps that are very disk intensive running at the same time forces the system to a crawl.

if yo udon't want to do this, you need to schedule them at different times using task scheduler or cron...