What can prevent backups?
 

I've got a bunch of machines (10.4, 10.5, iMacs, MacBooks, etc) that are _supposed_ to be running SD! every night and backing up to a sparseimage on a network share. They don't always run, and while some of it might be operator error (if the machine is powered off or the laptop is sleeping, I can't really expect it to work), some of it seems to be related to apps that are running.

Is there a list of known apps that will prevent SD! from running at a scheduled time? I'm guessing VMWare Fusion, but I can't be sure...

Some of my users have dozens of apps open, what are the ramifications of open files and open apps on SD! backups (and the restoration of the resulting files after a hard disk crash)?

I've set their machines up to:

Log in the user without a password (some really hate this)
Never sleep (when connected to power cord)
Mount the backup share when they log in.

I've instructed them to:

Reboot the machine when they are done with it for the night.
Ensure the power cable and network cable are attached.
Just walk away.

[This is really difficult for some of my users, and doesn't always happen.]

Any thoughts? Anything I can remove or change above to make it easier on the users but still make a useful (recoverable) backup? How does SD! deal with open files and apps when it does it's backup?

Should/does SD! work over wireless networks flawlessly?

Great program, though, once we get the above details worked out we'll be golden!

Running applications wouldn't prevent SD! from running, but might prevent that application's files from being copied properly. VMWare is a good example: you want to have big data files, like that, written to disk and closed before they're copied.

SD! should work fine -- although slowly -- over wireless...