Sometimes you can’t use Hypervisor backup software, for example when using physical machines (huh?) or Xenserver with unavailable storage for creating snapshots. Ofcourse commercial backup software is nice, but sometimes you don’t want to pay for that (whitebox home environment) or the customer doesn’t have the licenses.
Why don’t use software you already own? Let’s install Windows Server Backup :
It’s as easy as adding an extra feature to Windows Server.
After that it’s easy to generate to create a working backup :
Configuring Windows backup is very easy and I won’t go in to that. But there are some drawbacks. For example, Windows Server Backup doesn’t offer the option to send an email when a backup is (un)succesful. This is how you do that :
Windows Server logs the status of the completed backups in the eventlog. So we are going to use Task Scheduler to check the eventlog for event ID’s.
Open Windows Task Scheduler and select Create Task..:
Fill in the required information and make sure you select the appropiate user :
We are going to create to tasks, first one for a succesvol backup. Herefore we have to use Event Id 4 :
Fill in the appropiate email settings :
And click Ok. When new events are written to the eventlog they automaticly scanned for this ID in the selected eventlog.
Now create a second task (with the email unsuccelful) for the following event ID’s : 5,8,9,17,22,49,50,52,100,517,518,521,528,544,545,546,561,564 and 612. You have to create a trigger for every ID. So it takes some time (5 min) to create the unsuccesful task but you can export/import these tasks. I mine environment I created 2 tasks, one mailing succesvol backup (ID 4) and one unsuccesvol backup (all other ID’s). But ofcourse you can send an email for every different error with an different subject.
Now it’s time to create a scheduled Windows Backup task and here you go!