WBAdmin Bare-Metal Backup
Batch script for backing up to a network share.
Run taskschd.msc to set up a schedule for it.
@ECHO OFF MODE CON:COLS=50 LINES=10 TITLE MyPC Backup COLOR 17 ECHO. ECHO SCHEDULED BACKUP OF SYSTEM DRIVE ECHO ================================ ECHO C:\BATs\BareMetalBackup.bat ECHO. SET WBTARGET=\MyServer\Intrashare\MyPC-Backup\ SET WBTXTLOG=\MyServer\Intrashare\MyPC-Backup\log.txt WBADMIN START BACKUP -backupTarget:%WBTARGET% -user:DJ -password:MyPassword -allCritical -quiet > %WBTXTLOG%
Updated February 2017
The reason I started this article with a batch script using wbadmin.exe is that I found I could not use wbadmin.msc because it wanted me to do a backup at least once a day, while I only wanted one every week. However(!) I've found that you can just go ahead and create one, and just use taskschd.msc afterwards to adjust the timing! Under
Microsoft » Windows » Backup. The GUI of
wbadmin will still say it's daily, but it's not. It will however correctly report successful backups at the actual times you edit in task manager. :)Updated January 2018 - Veeam Agent v2.1 for Windows
Windows Server Backup has crapped out on me far too many times now, being sluggish and unstable over time. I'm testing Veeam these days as they have commercial-use enterprise options now for free. Scheduling, encryption, shared and local storage, incremental backups, custom retention. The back-end SQL DBMS uses some RAM (50-200 MiB) but not much when compared to its usefulness. The footprint is otherwise small (3 SQL components; Server (express), Management Objects and CLR types). These are backups you can load quickly straight into Hyper-V and have granular file access on. A single scheduled job is available in the free version, which is all I need.
Using it on a Hyper-V host, it will backup the VMs as files so you can recover them as well in a granular fashion. This is a supported method as long as you don't need application consistent backups (requires guest VSS/on-host agent), but will otherwise consistent and have full integrity.
If you need to entirely uninstall it, remove Veeam and its 3 SQL components. As well as these files and folders:
» C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\VeeamBackup.* » C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server Local DB\Instances\VeeamEndPoint
Visit Veeam: Veeam Availability for the Always-On Enterprise