Problem With USB Backup

I just bought a high capacity USB Flash Drive for backup, but ran into
problems with the "Documents & Settings" directory. I get a message
that "NTUSER: is being used by another program and the backup stops.
Is there a way to beat this? All other directories copy with no
problems.

E. Barry Bruyea wrote:

I just bought a high capacity USB Flash Drive for backup, but ran into
problems with the "Documents & Settings" directory. I get a message
that "NTUSER: is being used by another program and the backup stops.
Is there a way to beat this? All other directories copy with no
problems.

I am assuming either you or the message truncated the filename or have
not configured Windows Explorer to show filetypes. There is an
ntuser.dat file but "ntuser" (not extension) is unknown to me (so if it
exists then it is something created by you or software you used).

ntuser.dat is the user's hive in the registry. It's in use when you log
into that Windows account. The user profile folder under each Windows
account will have one because each user's registry hive is separate (and
why one Windows account will have different registry settings than
another Windows account). For Windows XP, the ntuser.dat file is under:

C:\Documents and Settings\username

If you are copying the entire "Documents and Settings" folder then you
are trying to copy *every* Windows account. Tis likely you do not have
permissions to copy files for other Windows accounts (it is setup that
way to keep users logging under different accounts from screwing with
each others documents and other data per-user data stored under there).
Just copy the files under YOUR account under there. A shortcut to that
path is %userprofile% (an environment variable used to specify what is
the user's profile folder under the account they are currently logged
into), or you can use the above folder path to copy your username
profile folder.

You never mentioned what backup program you are using. It will need to
use VSS (Volume Shadow Service) to get a copy of the file that it can
then copy. Otherwise, you would have to log under a different account
than the one under which is the ntuser.dat file you are trying to copy.
Note the aforementioned need to have privileges on the target Windows
account's profile folder. The account must be in the Administrators
security group. Then, while under the other account, copy the account's
%userprofile% since that account is not active and will not have
ntuser.dat locked.