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20060523

Changing Veritas BackupExec Job Notifications
Two of our backup jobs were not set to send completion notifications and we wanted to change that. Originally, when we were a brighter shade of green at managing backups than we are now, we didn't see a need to get notified when the weekly incremental backups completed (yes, weekly, cause that's all we need). Now we do, but when we went to edit a template-based job, we were warned that it would lose its association with its template. This disconnecting seemed inadvisable. Fortunately we found that we could edit the job (adding a notification) and lose the template association, but then reassociate the template with the job. Reassociating did not discard the notification information, perhaps because it is job-specific (you cannot set up notifications in a template).

posted by Tk at 12:09 • • sealed in amber

20060505

Windows Filename Annoyances
We had a problem with a directory not getting backed up, with a reported error of Windows not being able to find the file specified. The directory name was “letters of recommendation, etc.”, and we eventually figured out that it was the dot at the end causing the problem.

But before we figured that out, we tried a number of things: Command line cacls didn’t work, nor did rename or rmdir. (The latter with no args — using /s gave us the confirm prompt, but as we didn’t really want to delete the directory, we did not confirm). Of course trying to deal with it through the GUI did not work. Everybody’s friend “Cannot (delete/rename) file: Cannot read from the source file or disk” popped up, and looking at the properties told us it was a zero-byte entity.

A solution on Experts Exchange gave us the idea to look at things using the short names (dir /x). Doing that gave us the idea of trying to use rename on the short name; renaming letter~1 to letters worked, and then we renamed it to “letters of recommendation, etc” (even trying to force it to add the dot at the end failed, but silently).

It’s clear that a file or directory name in Windows cannot end with a dot, but it can have a dot in it, which is why using the dot at the end will not give you the popup that using a slash will. (Can you imagine the annoyance of a popup every time you enter a dot in a file or directory name, even if that dot isn’t going to be the end of the name? “You are not allowed to use the character ‘.’ at the end of the name. If you are going to continue typing, carry on. If not, Windows will strip that trailing dot.”)

posted by Tk at 08:43 • • sealed in amber