How do I automatically close a program so that its data can be backed up?

Thanks Leo for finding a solution. I lost my hard disk a few months back and was lucky enough to have remembered to manually close Outlook before the scheduled overnight backup. I had a complete backup that was only a few hours old when the hard disk died. More luck than good management. By using this, it removes one of the elements of luck so thank you again.

Hello everybody,

I think i have the solution for the outlook problem. I do this for more then a year now on my servers. I used retrospect together with maxtor one touch to, but it's no stable solution for back-up specialy not for servers because my maxtors (two) made some problems regular.
Now the solution, use SyncBackSe from 2brightspaks, install it on the pc where outlook is instaled and your PST file will be backed up together with your other data . Succes!!http://2brightsparks.com/
Alex.

I think the original question is confused between Outlook Express and Office Outlook.

Outlook Express uses DBX files to store the mail folders - not PST. It comes for free with Internet Explorer 4, and any version of Windows since 98.

Microsoft Office Outlook comes with Microsoft Office which you have to buy. It uses PST files.

I wrote a little utility to specifically close Microsoft Outlook so you can back up the PST file. It's freeware and you can download at http://offbe.at/files/default.aspx Note that my utility closes Outlook "nicely" and does not kill the process, so the PST file won't get corrupted.

Thx so much for this! It helped me out so much! I didn't have trouble with Outlook but with another program, so thx :D

thanks for the info leo, i tried this, cuz i need to close a program during night, but it just kinda block the program, it doesnt close it, i have to close the process manually cuz the program dont respond anymore, do you know any solution to this?

I noticed no quotations were put into the command in this example. It did not work for me without quotations. Once I put them in, it ran perfectly. I'm using WXPPro. Other than that, thanks.

Whe I saw this article, I thought: great, just what I need. But is doesn't work. I get the following log:
"nircmd.job" (nircmd.exe closeprocess outlook.exe) 20-6-2007 1:12:54 ** ERROR **
Unable to start task.
The specific error is:
0x80070005: Access is denied.
Try using the Task page Browse button to locate the application.

Any idea's? I am Administrator.

Thx

cu, Fr@

Hello,

nircmd works perfectly when executed interactively (in batchfile or from commandline) but not when executed in Task Scheduler on my Vista PC

Did I overlook a setting or is Vista a problem ?

Grtz

After I add closeprocess outlook.exe to the run line, save the task and click run, the status column says could not start. What am I doing wrong? I am admin.

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