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

• System image backup: Windows Backup provides you with the ability to create a system image, which is an exact image of a drive. A system image includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files. You can use a system image to restore the contents of your computer if your hard drive or computer ever stops working. When you restore your computer from a system image, it is a complete restoration; you can’t choose individual items to restore, and all of your current programs, system settings, and files are replaced. Although this type of backup includes your personal files, we recommend that you back up your files regularly using Windows Backup so that you can restore individual files and folders as needed. When you set up scheduled file backup, you can choose whether you want to include a system image. This system image only includes the drives required for Windows to run. You can manually create a system image if you want to include additional data drives. See an automated system image backup example

• Previous versions: Previous versions are copies of files and folders that Windows automatically saves as part of system protection. You can use previous versions to restore files or folders that you accidentally modified or deleted, or that were damaged. Depending on the type of file or folder, you can open, save to a different location, or restore a previous version. Previous versions can be helpful, but should not be considered a backup because the files get replaced by new versions and will not be available if the drive were to fail. For more information, see Shadow Copies

Last 3 posts by George

• Backup considerations for Microsoft SharePoint - July 26th, 2010
• What is Cloud Computing? - July 19th, 2010
• Is Cloud computing getting safer? - July 13th, 2010

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.

Basic setup  

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Virtual machines (VMs) are copied (cloned) to a remote computer (storage location) through the export functionality of the virtual server over a Gbit network connection. This can be performed overnight on a weekly or daily basis (depending on the function of your data). VMs can either be left in their exported format or successively imported locally to the computer as to verify their integrity. Additionally, the remote computer can be mounted as a local storage to the virtual server using the inbuilt NFS or iSCSI functionality. All you need is a good reference of the scripting commands available for your environment and the virtual server admin client application. The main cost of this setup is a computer with adequate storage space; say, two or three 1 TB SATA hard drives in a RAID configuration.

Advanced setup

This setup can perform the same tasks as the basic one plus more! Exported VMs to the central location can be successively imported to a second virtual server. This requires that the second server has sufficient free space to host the imported VMs (clones). In the event of a failure on server 1, the recovery time of any exported-imported VM is minimal as you only need to start the imported clone on server 2. The only additional task required would be, the restore operation of any data (at file level) that has changed since the last clone was done. For file data backups one would use the native backup utilities found in the major Operating Systems such as, NT backup for MS windows and Tar for Linux, running with scheduled jobs. Also, a faster alternate solution would be to connect both virtual servers as repositories of each other through NFS or iSCSI.

The suggested setups have some limitations and these are:

• Backups are done at an image level (clones) and not at file or folder level but this can be overcome through the free reliable solutions incorporated in the main operating systems.
• You need to shutdown the VM during an export procedure and hence, the backup process should happen after office hours but this would not be an option if the resource is required to be running 24/7. One would need to explore the snapshot functionality to overcome this setback.

Conclusion: – With what I call a high spec PC and a fast local network (Gbit NICs & switches – quite standard nowadays), the suggestions presented above can offer SMBs a backup and recovery solution without spending thousands of dollars. The same concept can applied between remote sites over a good Internet connection to provide a disaster recovery site. In the articles to come, I will be explaining some basic scripts that perform similar tasks in a typical virtual server environment.

Last 3 posts by George

• Backup considerations for Microsoft SharePoint - July 26th, 2010
• What is Cloud Computing? - July 19th, 2010
• Is Cloud computing getting safer? - July 13th, 2010

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

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 :)