Active File Exclusion - A potential disaster?

[Peter_Nilsson]

Dear Sir?s

I have noticed on at least two customer installations that MSDE databasefiles are not backed up and no notification of a failure is reported, even though these files clearly are checked in the selection lists. These installations does not have SQL-agents.

Document 242688 states that there is an "Active File Exclusion"-functionality in 9.x and 10.0 to eliminate "in use - skipped" errors in the .LOG files. (I suppose this concerns also later versions).

My questions are:

1. Does this feature automatically exclude other files than SQL-files without notice?

2. Is it possible to disable the "Active File Exclusion functionality"?

Furthermore; is it reasonable to have a feature that automatically exclude files without prior notice enabled by default!? Wouldnt it be better to have it disabled, at least on systems without SQL-Agent? Perhaps a notice in the log to enable the feature if one would like not to be informed of that critical files are not being backed up, would be better? Or a suggestion just to exclude the files? Please explain this very strange behavior.

Sincerely
Peter Nilsson
ECE Data AB
Sweden

[Ken_Putnam]

See http://support.veritas.com/docs/259152 for directions on how to diable Active File Exclusion and the types of files that are excluded

I totally agree that a note in the job log header "Active File Exclusion is active for this backup" or something similar should have been included.

[Peter_Nilsson]

Thank you!

Adding this registry key puts you back to the time when you were in control of what was backed up and what was not. A comment from Symantec would be appreciated though. This feature is not well known by users and could potentially cause a disaster when time comes for a restore.

/Peter