Lately, I have been having trouble backing up MS SQL 2000 files with ntbackup – running on Windows Server 2000.
As it happens, there is an easy way to deal with this. By modifying the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Ntbackup\Backup Engine to 1, backup will deal with each file – even if it is in use!
Of course, I still stop and start the SQL service to ensure that the file is not being modified. I’m not really confident that it works that well…