Hi there,

I thought I'd be clever and incorporate NTBackup into the pre-freeze backup script of an Active Directory VM. What the script does specifically is run an NTBackup of the system state to the local disk, and then copy the backup file to a remote file share. If an error is generated while running the script, the pre-freeze script returns the error number prior to exiting (which means that in the event of any sort of NTBackup error, the nightly regular backup of the VM will be not occur). I tried this idea out in the test environment, and it works most of the time. However, occasionally a VSS error 12301 (no response from GatherWriterStatus) is generated, but despite the error the NTBackup completes just fine. So I changed the pre-freeze script to ignore all error instances of 12301 (a 0 is returned instead).

So what I what to know is, is this a great idea or a very bad idea? I figured everything would be okay because the NTBackup should complete prior to when the disks are quiesced (due to the nature of the pre-freeze script).