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Windows provides the following backup tools:

• File backup: Windows Backup allows you to make copies of data files. You can let Windows choose what to back up or you can select the individual folders, libraries, and drives that you want to back up. By default, your backups are created on a regular schedule. You can change the schedule and you can manually create a backup at any time. Once you set up Windows Backup, Windows keeps track of the files and folders that are new or modified and adds them to your backup. To set up file backup, see the following backup steps

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Given the widespread success of virtualization, many SMBs rely exclusively on the inbuilt features as their main data protection plan and which may appear adequate at face value! One would need to see the overall picture! Virtual server based tools such as, snapshots and export/import utilities that are found in the major products, help organizations protect their data to a certain degree! It is not enough to backup data, being a clone or a file to the same virtual server. In fact, major manufacturers and their fellow partners provide a vast range of backup solutions that fulfill all requirements of a proper backup policy. With SMBs, the deciding factor may be costs! Do they have the budget to purchase such applications? However, for the unlucky IT techies that never manage to get their superiors buying these expensive products can still develop a similar mechanism. Using some basic scripting and inexpensive hardware they can build backup solutions similar to these expensive applications as they too, make use of the inbuilt or native tools found in the major virtualization products.

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The windows 7 Backup and Restore console do not allow you to schedule Image backups :( On the other hand, ad hoc manual Image backups can be performed!

System Image Backup

However, in Windows 7 you can use the Wbadmin command-line utility to perform scheduled clones (snapshots) of your PC!  The normal backup rules need to be observed before using this utility and these are:

• The destination location should be a second internal hard drive, an external hard drive, a network shared drive or multiple DVDs – not recommended/feasible
• The destination drive should be formatted with NTFS file system – windows 7 default
• Adequate space is available on the destination drive – equal to the source data size (Actually, even less than that!)
• The utility needs administrative privilegese

Now, let’s see how easy it is to create an automated task that initiates a System Image backup of the c: drive and saves it to another drive :) Assuming your system volume or drive is the c: and your destination drive is f: (where f: can be a second hard drive or a network share). Save the following text in a file with an extension .bat Ex: SystemSnapshot.bat

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wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:e: -include:c: -allCritical -quiet

This wbadmin utility will start an image backup of your c: drive and system/boot volumes if not specified while it saves it to the f: drive.

As with any script, you can then create a schedule job using SCHTASKS ( Windows Task Scheduler command) as follows:

SCHTASKS /Create /SC weekly /D sun /TN “Imagebkup” /TR c:\scripts\SystemSnapshot.bat /ST 22:00 /IT

where the task scheduler will run the Image backup script every Sunday on weekly basis at 22:00 hours. Assuming the user is logged on and have administrative rights! However, I do recommend to use the native Windows 7 Task Scheduler Utility to set a schedule as this utility is much improved in this new OS :) Check for errors if any in the history tab of your scheduled task. An error return code of O means ok!

A folder structure is created on the destination drive together with a number of files. The most important file is the .vhd one where in Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate editions, you can restore all your data and applications. How to mount this image and restore your computer will be explained in a future article :)