Question : Problem: NTBackup job inexplicably disappears - no log output, no event logs

We have a customer with a fairly new Windows 2003 Standard server.  The NTBackup job is scheduled for every night to backup their main set of data to a BKF on a USB drive which is permanently attached.  The job runs when nobody is around and, in testing during day time, works flawlessly everytime.

On occasion nights (more often than not) the backup will begin as scheduled & the event log shows the NTBackup starting, the ESENT shadow copy entries & NTBackup posts a confirmation of the settings in a second log entry after the ESENT entries as normal.  That's the last evidence there is of the job though: the NTBackup Report log is completely blank and no other event logs occur to throw any light on the situation (some information logs occur: Ci Service doing some maintenance).

I've switched the log setting to full in the hope that it'll at least confirm some activity before "disappearing" in tomorrow's log, but I'm completely baffled.  If it had crashed, I'd expect to see entries for the crash in the System log but there's nothing for the period of the backup duration to indicate what is occuring.  The BKF file typically manages more than 10GB (the backup as a whole is just shy of 17GB) but there's no consistent amount there ("above 10GB" is the nearest thing to consistent.  I've tried moving the backup to widely different times of the night, but still the disappearances occur.  I'm currently thinking along the lines of some other activity occuring over night (they have a Tobit server install which performs a purge of databases at 1am but the backup should be completed by then if started at 20:00 - it only takes 1.5 hours at most).

Any significant pointers welcome at this stage!

Answer : Problem: NTBackup job inexplicably disappears - no log output, no event logs

I've seen something similar to this.... where I didn't get anything in the NTBackup logs.   However, the backup *did* run... and ran successfully!

I did a "verify option" on the backup that it created and everything seemed OK.   Spooky...