Run NTBackup in the background?

[PittWolfBW]

Good morning!

Per a request from my upper management, I've been working on a solution to automatically back up users' Outlook and Eudora mail files on a regular scheduled basis, from their local hard drives to a remote server. After much trial and error, I came up with the following method (which does work).

I set up an NTBackup job to copy the files, and then copied out the actual command line data. I created a batch file containing this data, as well as code at the beginning and end to map and unmap the network share. I've tested it and it works nicely.

The one problem is this - when it executes, NTBackup launches onscreen. For several reasons, I'd really like to avoid this - one, as I work in a research facility, there would certainly be a host of complaints about the program appearing while they're working. I am also keen to avoid their cursor focus being stolen away from what they're doing, or having them accidentally click off on the backup job, and so on.

This brings me to my actual question - is there a way to cause the NTBackup job to run "invisibly" as it were? If I can do so, then the job will run with no notice or effect on the user, which is my end goal - I want to achieve a totally transparent solution for them. However, I'm unable to find any way to do this so far.

By comparison, I did something similar for our Mac users (yes, I'm administering a mixed environment), with a bash shell script in the Unix terminal environment, using the cron jobs. When the cron job runs, it is completely invisible to the user - is there any way to emulate this effect with NTBackup in Windows?

As a few side notes: I chose NTBackup because it utilizes the Volume Shadow Copy service, and hence it can run even if Outlook has been left on (which is often a problem here). I do not have the option of using something more robust such as Backup Exec for example, as the sheer volume of users and computers I'm dealing with make it unfeasible.

Thanks very much,

Brian