Introducing Arcserve Backup Agents and Options › Using Agents › Agent for Open Files › Best Practices › Backing up a Small Amount of Data on a Large Volume › Backing up Files that are Not Supported by a Writer

Backing up Files that are Not Supported by a Writer

The agent operates independent of other applications. The agent for Arcserve Backup backs up open files without disturbing an application; an application can write to its files when a backup job is running without having to communicate with the agent at all.

• When backing up open files, VSS relies on VSS-aware applications, known as Writers, to prepare their associated files for backup. For example, the Microsoft Exchange Writer is responsible for preparing Microsoft Exchange files.
• If there is no Writer available for a certain application, any open files of that type are not reliably backed up.

Using the agent for backing up is the only way to guarantee that all open files, including those that are not associated with a Writer, will be reliably backed up. If open files that are not associated with a Writer are backed up using VSS, there is no guarantee of transactional integrity and you will run the risk of invalidating the entire backup.