I have a Windows 2003 server that is running a semi-custom backup task. The scheduled task calls NTbackup with a few switches depending on whether it is a full or incremental backup. Most of the time, the NTbackup completes fine, and the wrapper then appends the NTbackup log into its own log before adding a few final comments and completing.

The problem I am having is that sometimes, NTbackup seems to just... blank out. It always completes backup of the C: and E: drives, but then it will start the system state and not add any more messages into the event log saying it completed that. And the NTbackup log is left empty, since it doesn't write anything to the log until all the backup tasks are complete. This is causing the wrapper to append no text into its own log. That causes problems for us because we read the information out of that log to determine whether backups are failing. The wrapper task also reports that it is completing normally in the event log.

Anyone ever seen a case where system state doesn't complete consistently? To be clear, the server is not logging any error messages anywhere. It's just not seeming to complete or log anything.