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Windows Server Backup – What To Do When Your Antivirus Locks Up Your Files

It happens sometimes that your favorite antivirus locks up your files every time your backup engine tries to access them for, well, backup. You may want to contact customer support for your specific antivirus. In my case, Bitdefender had set itself to protecting my files so much that my scheduled backup failed, failed, and failed… and failed again. So, I ask Bitdefender customer support for a quick guide on what to do. Following is what they said. It turns out to be what worked as well.

Most likely there is some interference with the backup process, adding an exclusion for the backup application process in the Antimalware > Settings section of your policy might fix the situation, I provided the steps below.
  1. Log in to Bitdefender Control Center.
  2. Go to Policies page.
  3. In case you already have a custom policy created, click on it in order to edit. Otherwise, click the + Add button to create a new policy.
  4. Go to Antimalware > Settings tab.
  5. Select Custom Exclusions.
  6. Choose Process from the Type menu.
  7. In the Files, folders, extensions or processes column, type the full path to the application you want to exclude from scanning.
  8. Choose On-access from the Modules menu and click the “+” button to add the application to the exclusions list.
  9. Repeat steps 4 to 8, but select ATC/IDS from the Modules menu.
  10. Click Save to send the policy to the target machines.

The wbadmin.exe and wbengine.exe files might be the ones for which you need to create the exclusions.

And yes, they were and they worked after I followed the steps. ‘Nough said!

I really couldn’t find a Bitdefender image with free license for reuse with modification, but I found this one about Ebola. So, let’s just learn

how-the-ebola-virus-attacks
How the Ebola virus attacks according to the WHO