Sep 25 2008
Windows Server Backup 2008: NTBackup done right?
The Past…
I remember the good all Windows 95 / 98 times installed over FAT partitions. Back-up was fairly simple at that time. All you needed to do was to install a fresh system with the OS, drivers and required applications. When satisfied with the results, just start your PC in DOS mode and use any command line archiving utility to back-up your Windows and Program Files folders. My archive had only 150MB at that time…
If anything went wrong, you would just start your PC in DOS mode, delete the Windows & Program Files directory and unpack your backup (could even be a self extract file) and… taaadaa! Up and running.
Since the introduction of NT (BTW: NT are the initials for New Technology) systems and NTFS (New Technology File System 
) a utility was bundled with the OS named NTBackup (ntbackup.exe) which could be used to backup your file system (the whole or portions of it). The application was actually designed by Veritas (ring any bells?) The only downside of NTBackup was that initially it supported only tape drives as backup media, and neither of us had a minimum 2k$ to spend for a DLT tape drive unit.
Things changed with Windows 2000 Server which allowed the use of mounted hard drives as backup media. Selected files of partition to be backed can now be saved as a *.bkf file on your file system. Still, the process was not flawless since locked up system files couldn’t be backed up, being in use by the system it self. Restore from backup was a bit awkward, since the system must be reinstalled and afterwards the files restored from backup.
Windows Server 2003 brought to us what is called Volume Shadow Copy or simply called VSS. VSS Service allows you play round with system files although they’re in use by the system. Therefore, one can now backup the entire boot partition and use the Recovery Console to restore a crashed OS, but still the process was not very strait forward.
The Present…
Nowadays, in Windows Server 2008, the backup “mechanics” was redesigned. A new backup engine backs up your data and generates a *.vhd file. What is really cool here is that this VHD file can be used as a Virtual Hard Drive. One can attach the file to an already running Virtual Server 2005 or Hyper-V virtual machine and access the data on the VHD file the same way you access a normal partition. One thing that I haven’t tested yet is to create a new virtual machine using the VHD file resulted from backing up a boot partition (I’ll let you know).
The new Windows Server Backup keeps track of your backup history and presents you with the option to recover any of the versions available in the catalog. If you want to create scheduled backups, you must have a HDD to spare, Windows Server Backup will use that hard drive as backup media. Warning here, the HDD cannot be used for other purposes, as it will be completely hidden from the file system.
The new Windows Server Backup is not available after default system installation. It must be added from Server Roles & Features.
My system: up and running in 5 minutes. Yes, that’s right. Intel S5000VSA Server board IPMI driver screw something up after the installation in the system, so the Hyper-V virtual machines failed to start (yep, same General Access Denied error). Luckily me, previous backup was 1 day old, so I’ve just boot the server from Windows Server 2008 installation disk, select repair, then use restore from backup as a repair option. You will be presented with all available backups from the catalog. It took 5 minutes to restore a 10 GB VHD file over the boot partition. After startup, everything was in the right place.
One tip here: try as much as possible to keep your boot partition as clean as you can. Do not use the boot partition to store files. A good size for a 2008 Server boot partition is between 40 and 50 GB. Yes, and move that swap file from the boot partition.
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