Fbackup and robocopy endless loop oddity

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gn842
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 2:59 pm

Fbackup and robocopy endless loop oddity

Post by gn842 »

I'm using a home build computer with win 8.0. I was experimenting with Fbackup and its rival robocopy. Somehow, I got into a situation where robocopy.exe was doing a routine that I had scheduled and it simply would not stop. It would take hours to do an 80 gig file backup.

Where it gets weird is that when I uninstalled the program robocopy.exe continued to do its nightly hours long backup. I used a couple of utilities (advanced uninstall and max uninstaller) to get "more of the stuff out." I did searches on robocopy in Win explorer and went after individual files, getting an education about what it's like to try to delete elements of the operating system (I didn't penetrate the mysteries). I did virus and other scans thinking I had a corrupted robocopy. At one point, I saw a file associated with robocopy (the free utility) in my Fbackup scheduled tasks!

Then I uninstalled Fbackup too. And STILL the nightly routine went on. Finally I exchanged emails with Steve Turner at Turnsoft, who was very generous with this time, given it is a free utility. He suggested I check the Task Scheduler.

And there, even though I had done as complete an uninstall as I knew how to do, were BOTH the Fbackup and Robocopy jobs.

Here is my attempt at an explanation. I downloaded both programs and operated them simultaneously the same way you might operate Mozilla and Chrome and not think twice about it.

But I think that both robocopy and Fbackup use installed utilities already in Win 8 (and probably other versions). In particular, at one time, I had, without thinking, scheduled both programs to operate at the same time on the same night.

Anyhow, what happened is I think both of these programs got very confused. The Turnsoft robocopy.exe utility went into some kind of endless Dos loop (I watched it on my dos window, scrolling and scrolling through files, for hours on end). The Fbackup seems to have gotten confused too (the mysterious file that appeared in the scheduled tasks underneath the task I had put in).

Furthermore, neither company appears to have provided for deletion from the task scheduler (which they both appear to use) during the uninstall process. Or, it might be the case, that because both were on the same machine the uninstall process got bollixed up.

I'm not competent to say. But what I will say is:

1. Don't try to use two programs of this kind at once.
2. Probably better not to have the two on the same machine.
3. If mysterious things occur, check the task scheduler and delete jobs if need be.
4. If you get into a situation similar to mine, do uninstalls as completely as possible (for example, use Advanced Uninstall and let it go after every single extension) and then check the task scheduler and purge whatever is left.

After which teh situation should calm down. Wait a few days to make sure it is all calm. Then choose which program you want and use it and only it. And if you decide to switch programs make sure, after your uninstall, that there are no ghost jobs continuing to run due to the task scheduler.

I'm tossing this out there because I've this forum come up during forum crawls to try to deal with my problem and I thought it might be helpful to have the event described where it might help someone else.

GN

Adrian (Softland)
Posts: 1953
Joined: Thu May 23, 2013 7:57 am

Re: Fbackup and robocopy endless loop oddity

Post by Adrian (Softland) »

Hi,

If you uninstalled FBackup and the scheduled tasks were not removed for some reason, they should just display a message something like that the "job name was not found". Those tasks points to an exe file of FBackup and indicate which backup job to be executed. As long as you uninstalled FBackup, the backup won't be executed because the .exe file is missing.

From the situations reported by our users, the incomplete uninstall were when using different applications. We always recommend to uninstall the programs from Control Panel->Programs->Uninstall

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