XP Professional goes to sleep during a network backup

[Bob Cronin]

All the Win XP Pro client computers on my network are setup to sleep
after 30 minutes of inactivity. This works fine in most cases. However,
I do weekly backups of the clients over the network to another Win XP
Pro machine running Retrospect Professional. I have a script that kicks
off just before the backup that wakes the target client up, waits for a
minute or so and then starts the backup. This also works fine most of
the time.

However, one of my client computers takes longer than the others to be
backed up (more than 30 minutes). After 30 minutes, it goes back to
sleep, despite being in the middle of a backup.

For some reason, Windows doesn't think there is anything going on (i.e.
that the computer is inactive), when clearly it is not.

My question, then, is how does Windows asses "activity", and why would
the ongoing backup not be being included in that assesment?

The backup runs with nobody logged on (i.e. the Retrospect Client runs
as a service using the local system account, so it can work regardless
of whether any users are logged in). I tried changing the way the
service logs on to use the Administrator account rather than the local
system account but it did not help.

Any ideas (ok, I know I could turn off the go-to-sleep-after-30-minutes,
or perhaps lengthen the time interval, but I would like to try to get it
working without having to resort to that, if possible)?

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Well, I suppose it's a bit of a cop out to just kludge a solution, rather than try to find the right setting, but my way to work
around it is to run a script that sleeps for 15 minutes, wakes up and opens and closes notepad.
-go.vbs--
count = 0
Boolean = true
while(Boolean)
set shell=("wscript.shell")
wscript.sleep 900000 'wait 15 minutes
shell.run "Notepad.exe"
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_Process Where Name = 'Notepad.exe'")
For Each objProcess in colProcessList
objProcess.Terminate()
count=count + 1
if count=4 then Boolean=false 'change to desired repeat count
wend
wscript.quit
--cut--

I think you can see alternatives for checking the backup process, but it depends on your scripting experience.

 

[Bob Cronin]

Well, I suppose it's a bit of a cop out to just kludge a solution, rather than try to find the right setting, but my way to work
around it is to run a script that sleeps for 15 minutes, wakes up and opens and closes notepad.
-go.vbs--
count = 0
Boolean = true
while(Boolean)
set shell=("wscript.shell")
wscript.sleep 900000 'wait 15 minutes
shell.run "Notepad.exe"
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_Process Where Name = 'Notepad.exe'")
For Each objProcess in colProcessList
objProcess.Terminate()
count=count + 1
if count=4 then Boolean=false 'change to desired repeat count
wend
wscript.quit
--cut--

I think you can see alternatives for checking the backup process, but it depends on your scripting experience.

Thanks. I considered such workarounds, but I'd really like to know why
the backup going on in the background is not considered "activity"
enough to prevent Windows from going back to sleep.