Wednesday 10 February 2010

Automating the Windows Home Server Backup for the WHS?

One of the little surprises that we have run across with WHS is the inability to schedule a backup of the WHS unit itself!

We plugged in a large USB hard drive to back things up with, and ended up running into a roadblock when looking through the WHS Console and all of the settings locations for a backup scheduler.

This is a bit of an odd puzzle since the unit is supposed to be a _server_ for home use! :(

So, to get a scheduled backup, we need to go to a third party tool set and configure a key stroke macro to run via the Task Scheduler.

No sense reinventing the wheel, so have a look at the following instruction set on where to get the tool and how to configure it on WHS to get a “scheduled” backup:

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Mike said...

Phil - how does this compare to BDBB?
I thought that backs up the server (no wait, this backs up the backup database of the desktop images?).

http://mswhs.com/2009/04/23/add-in-windows-home-server-backup-database-backup-bdbb-1016/

What about notifications of backups of desktops and the backup of the database? I haven't found anything on that. Is there notification built in there somewhere? Or you have to rely on the icon by the clock on the desktop of a PC to alert you to a problem?

Anonymous said...

As you say, there's no point in reinventing the wheel so just use ntbackup. Start, run "ntbackup" enter. Scheduling, system state, the lot. Easy!