NTBackup and an unusual file name of "|" 1

[Excalibur1701]

Have an NT 4.0 server that I'm tyring to do a backup on using NTBackup. There is a file in the C:\WINNT called "|" (that's all it is named, just the Bar line) that, causes the backup to fail everytime when it reaches this file. I've noticed on the other NT servers that this file exists too, so I'm afraid to delete it. Does anyone know what this file is used for? And, why is it causing my NTBACKUP to lock up everytime I try to back it up.

Oh, by the way, the "|" file is 0 bytes long and has no extension.

Thanks...

 

[TonyGroves]

Since "|" is an illegal character in file names, the file could only have been "created" by either a corruption in the file system (unlikely, since it appears on all your servers), or a program that bypasses the file system, such as a defrag program. Since it has a length of 0, deleting it or renaming it (if you can) shouldn't do any harm.

 

[cmeagan656]

We used to have this problem. We did some troubleshooting and narrowed the problem down to a particular program, then uninstalled the program and reinstalled it. Ours used to show up in our user\windows folder.

You can delete the file without causing any problems. However, if it is created because of a bad application its just going to reappear everytime a user accesses that app.

Cheers.

 

[Excalibur1701]

Thanks...when I try to delete the file, it goes thru the motions of deleting it, but, then it appears once again, almost immediately

Do you remember what program you had to uninstall?

Thanks for the comments!

 

[cmeagan656]

We're an accounting firm in Canada. It was Corporate TaxPrep. It turned out that our financial statement software (CaseWare) used an older version of a dll than Corporate Taxprep did and neither program used MSInstaller to install. When we updated CaseWare it corrupted the dll.

Ours was relatively easy to troubleshoot because we use terminal services. I just checked each user's "recent" folder in the TS profile until I got a date/time stamp matching the | file. The weird thing with us was that it didn't happen with all users that accessed the program, but it always happened to the same users. Also, it only happened on the file ->open command, not by accessing it from the recent file list in the program or from the documents list.

Cheers.