scheduled backup with multiple accounts

[sportbiker]

Here's the scenario. Three accounts: one admin and two standard. As Admin, I schedule a daily all-user file backup. With Fast User Switching, I switch to a standard account and don't touch the Admin account for many weeks (the account is only for admin duties and not regular use) even though the account is still logged-in.

Will SD correctly perform its backup even though the Admin account is not the active account? Also, I take it the computer will not awaken from sleep to perform the backup. Is that correct?

[dnanian]

No, it won't, as documented in the User's Guide. The account you schedule under must be in front. (I also cover the sleep case in the User's Guide...)

[sportbiker]

Unless it's scheduled as Root?

[dnanian]

Even then, I don't believe it'd run when logged in as a different user.

[douglasdolois]

When Super Duper makes a backup, aren't all user accounts backed up?

Why would you need to log in as different users to perform additional backups?

Douglas

Originally Posted by sportbiker

Here's the scenario. Three accounts: one admin and two standard. As Admin, I schedule a daily all-user file backup. With Fast User Switching, I switch to a standard account and don't touch the Admin account for many weeks (the account is only for admin duties and not regular use) even though the account is still logged-in.

Will SD correctly perform its backup even though the Admin account is not the active account? Also, I take it the computer will not awaken from sleep to perform the backup. Is that correct?

[dnanian]

All user accounts are backed up. The issue here is whether the scheduler will run when a different account -- other than the one you scheduled with -- is logged in.

[ToddRevisited]

Are there any plans to correct this problem? I'm currently selecting backup tools, and this restriction (backups don't run unless a specific user is active) will cause me huge problems.

All of my machines are multi-user, so there's no way I'll get reliable backups unless they can run in the background, unattended, no matter who is logged-in. The current behavior is equivalent to purely manual backups, which we all know to be rather less than dependable.

I'm frankly surprised to discover this. I used Retrospect for years and it worked fine in this regard, so I know it can be done. And as a software developer myself, I can't imagine any system-level constraint that would keep this from working. It seems to me that SD would need to have root permissions in order to replicate all files, in which case it shouldn't matter what user is currently using the UI.

[dnanian]

Not in the short term, ToddRevisited.