Fun with Windows Server Backup

Created by Terry Humphris
Last updated: Jul 10, 2014
2 min read

WSB warning

The nature and capacity of our backups has been evolving, from incremental overnight tape backups to full near line storage of complete VMs. We have many instances of Server 2008 R2, and thus I am coming to rely heavily on Windows Server Backup. Lately I have been creating a number of scheduled task calls to wbadmin. I have opted for scheduled tasks in order to have multiple WSB backups to a variety of remote UNC targets. The tasks will invoke full backups of whatever I put into -include and will be pointed at whatever UNC I put into -backuptarget.

The underlying mechanics work nicely, and there are a number of step-throughs available on the net, but what caused me to stumble this morning was a simple switch, and the importance of including that switch on any automated WSB.

-quiet

 Maybe I was unlucky on the examples I chose to read about, but the importance of the -quiet switch was not underlined. Here's the Microsoft write up on the command here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742083.aspx

What I am doing is close to scenario #3, as I am backing up to a remote UNC location. I would run the command in a scheduled task and it would appear to be running, but there was no progress and I could see the target was not being updated. This sparked the usual digging expedition through Windows Firewall, user permissions, share paths, all to no avail. I put the command into a batch script instead and called that, with much the same outcome. The scheduled task fires, it's running, but no real progress.

So eventually I got back around to running it manually. I had done this successfully days earlier when ironing out the basic commands. Aha! When triggering the backup to a remote UNC you will ALWAYS get the prompt pictured, warning about lack of protection at the UNC location. You have to click Y/N to proceed. Hence you will not be able to schedule a task, a script execution, or any other automation you might dream up, without responding to the warning, or including the -quiet switch to suppress it. Simple but deadly if you forget, like I did, and leave it out.