Turns out Windows has this neat thing called Volume Shadow Copy. Its usefulness lies in the ability to back up files that are open for writing, and on a 2003 Server you can even keep up to 64 copies of a network-shared resource. That is, a file being modified by a user is automatically backed up every time before it’s written, and also when it’s deleted. Kind of a transparent backup — transparent to the user (which is good) and to the admin (also not bad).
The one downside of this magnificent mechanism — it bloody doesn’t work. I want to back up a single small file — it hangs for about 5 minutes and then spits out a log saying “Catastrophic failure”. Disabling Shadow Copy also doesn’t work. The disk I’m trying to back up from holds the cache of KerioWinRoute and the mailboxes of KerioMailServer, nothing else unusual. Neither ntbackup can make an archive, nor does the transparent backup feature work.
Sure, I could use WinRAR or nnBackup to make copies, but I’d really like to figure this out.