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| Thread ID: 97944 | 2009-03-05 04:50:00 | True Image - Reply to post 'Waking up out of suspended mode to make a backup' | Misty (368) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 753604 | 2009-03-05 04:50:00 | This thread on Wilders Security Forums to which I have subscribed last year, started in 28.10.07. - this guy thinks he has the answer. Hope he's right. I will have to think about his solution. Any thoughts ? :dogeye: SUCCESS!! A few days ago, I decided to circle back and see whether I could come up with a solution to the problem on not being able to run differential (or presumably incremental) backups using the Vista Task Scheduler/StayAwake method. I succeeded. 1) Background: As we all know, the ATI built-in scheduler will not wake a computer from sleep mode to run a task. While the Windows Task Manager will allow you to schedule a task, there's a problem with Vista. It seems that when Microsoft was designing Vista they tried to address the problem some users had with laptops where a sleeping laptop would be inadvertently awaken (e.g. it would get brushed or bumped in a backpack) and the computer would stay awake and drain the battery. MS "solved" this problem by having the computer fall back to sleep after a short period of time (2 minuted) if the computer is awaken from sleep but there is no user input. They call this being awaken in "unattended" mode. The problem for us ATI users was that if you used the Vista Task Scheduler to start an ATI task when the computer was asleep (e.g. in the middle of the night when a lot of people want to run a daily backup) the computer would wake, start the ATI task, but fall back asleep two minutes later. The task would not be completed until the user woke the computer the next morning. 2) StayAwake, a partial solution. In this thread we discussed this falling asleep problem. I discovered a discussion of Microsoft's reasoning and a suggestion for a fix. See posts # 14 and 17 in this thread. I had hoped that Acronis would review the materials and implement the code necessary to address the issue (something that should have been done before they declared ATI Vista compatible). Acronis did nothing. Fortunately, Mark (forum name k0lo) bravely took up the challenge and with his neighbor, Chris, developed a utility called StayAwake that would keep the computer awake. Using StayAwake you could use the Vista Task Scheduler to schedule an ATI task to run when the computer was asleep. Great!! Unfortunately, it turned out that for some (and possibly all) users, every backup would be a full backup even if the task was designed to create differential backups. This was not horrible, but it was a major inconvenience because, of course, you eat up disk space pretty quickly with a bunch of full backups. Again, I asked ATI to address this problem. They did not. 3) BCronin finds another solution. In August 2008, BC reported that he had found and modified the registry entry in Vista that controls how long Vista stays awake during an unattended task. See post #47 in this thread. BC modified the entries so his computer would not fall asleep for an hour after being awoken in unattended mode. At the time BC reported his discovery, I noted that I could not find the registry key he referenced and hypothesized it was a feature added with Vista SP1. (I had not yet installed SP1 at the time). Sure enough when I recently went back to look for the registry key BC identified, I was able to find it. Like BC, i modified the key (in fact I modified the keys for each power scheme) to "e10" (i.e. 3600 seconds). 4) A Solution: Here's the solution. I opened the Vista Task Scheduler and disabled the tasks I had been using to make daily backups with StayAwake. I then used Vista Task Scheduler to crate new "simple" tasks. For example, I create one task to awaken the computer at 1 am and run the calculator program. Next I used ATI's task manager to create new tasks that would start 1 minute after the Vista scheduled task. So, for example, I created a new task to run at 1:01 am to create a backup of my OS partition (with 6 differential backups followed by a full). My thinking was that the Vista scheduled task would wake the computer and because I'd changed the registry, the computer would be awake when the ATI task time came. Sure enough, it works! For the past 2 nights, my computer has awaken, the ATI tasks have run and then the computer has fallen back to sleep. I still believe that this is an inelegant solution and that Acronis should have addressed this by now. However, something is better than nothing and this solution will work. Good luck. Misty :) |
Misty (368) | ||
| 753605 | 2009-03-05 04:53:00 | Oops ! How did I put this in Chat... and how do I get into PressF1 ? Misty :confused: |
Misty (368) | ||
| 753606 | 2009-03-05 06:25:00 | Face due East, adopt a deferential pose, offer to read all the ads on PF1 and maybe a mod will move this ;) | R2x1 (4628) | ||
| 753607 | 2009-03-06 12:36:00 | Bump, cough. | R2x1 (4628) | ||
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