Windows Server Backup – NTBackup replacement

So I was looking into the possibilities to backup my Hyper-V “farm” (well I do got a few servers running on my Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V server ;-)), and I came to think of good old NTBackup from Windows 2000/2003.  NTBackup has however been replaced by “Windows Server Backup” which is both good and not so good, I think that the new product is likely more professional in some senses however it has some strange ideas on how to do some of it.

Anyway, I have only looked at it for a couple of hours but here are my findings, maybe you’ll find them useful in getting started yourself.

First off you must install “Windows Server Backup” on Windows 2008 R2 this is a feature – so add new feature …….

Then you would likely like to setup a new backup schedule, and here is one of those strange tings I mentioned.  The MINIMUM interval for a backup schedule on Windows Server Backup is 24 hours, that mean that the job HAS to run at LEAST every 24h – Now this may be well and good in some setups, but I don’t need a backup of my Virtual servers every 24h!?!?  My poor server would die under the workload 😀  But in the GUI there is NO way around this 🙁  I found a web-cast where a command-line workaround was outlined, but I might not have payed enough attention because I could not get it to work and thus sought alternate solutions. 

MY workaround for this scheduling issue is this;

• Start Windows Server Backup
• Create a “Backup Schedule” (it’s a wizzard, so it is quite easy)
• Now close Windows Server Backup
• Goto – “Start menu”, “Administrative Tools” and select “Task Scheduler”
• Drill down to; “Task Scheduler Library”, “Microsoft”, “Windows”, “Backup”
• Now edit the job “Microsoft-Windows-WindowsBackup”
• Edit the “Trigger” and you can now set the job you created to launch whenever you want

I’m sure there are other ways, but this is easy and works.

Some screenshots;

And finally some light reading for further details 🙂

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2009/04/13/customizing-windows-server-backup-schedule.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2009/06/22/backup-version-and-space-management-in-windows-server-backup.aspx

Web-Cast (quite informative);
http://www.netometer.com/video/tutorials/windows-server-2008-backup/

I might drill further into this at a later point, but for now this seem to satisfy my needs.