searcherrr
Technical User
I have an elaborate backup setup with scsi drives in a RAID package and we are now using "Windows Server Backup" the backup feature that comes with Windows Server Backup 2008 R2 64 bit. IE: Old ntbackup now on steroids etc.. wbadmin, wbengine, etc.. - The problem is that after much study, experimentation and even more research, I thought I could script an Incremental Media Rotation via batch cmd and Task Scheduler by setting various drives to Incremental under the "Configure Performance Settings" for WSB, but it doesn't appear to be working how I wanted it to.
What happens is I switch out a RAID SCSI drive for each day of the week. All but 1 of the servers always finishes before the next day. The server that doesn't finish in time has over 2TB of data on it and for WSB the limit of the backup is 2TB, so I have split that server into 3 backups respectively for where the bulk of the data is located.
I can run the backup fine (to a shared folder) and instead of running INCREMENTAL as "set to" on say Monday, it runs a FULL even though its set to an incremental. Since Monday's backup copy is a manual-finger-moved-file-copy from Friday (as are all other drives also; Tues - Thurs) I believe the WSB isn't sensing it wasn't truly the last backup that it ran against, and is trying to reindex and recopy everything again. Therefore, my attempt to turn a FULL copy (daily via WSB) into an INCREMENTAL copy fails out, because it seems like WSB wants the previous drive and backup copy it ran against. IS that so? Anyone know WSB better than I do? ....particularly for the version for 2008 R2 64 bit?
If this is the case, how can I achieve a truly incremental (that will run in like 6 minutes or less each time as it does on the same exact media and same exact backup copy on that media) copy using Microsoft WSB R2 64bit (wbadmin, wbengine)?????
To me, the backup shouldn't care about the media ID (which I assume it is reading the serial number of the hard drive to get the mediaID that is saves in a file in the backup location) and should just care that it sees a previous backup copy sitting in a target folder, waiting to be updated incrementally. So how could I trick WSB into thinking that Monday's hard drive is Friday's hard drive? Find a way to change the volume serial number to that of "Friday's" disk, for everyday of the week? or if I were to restore the backup catalog of Friday's disk to Monday's disk.... would that trick it into thinking Monday's disk is Friday's (the last copy done)???
I realize this seems like a lot to go through just to back stuff up on a good media rotation, but if I can get this incremental backup over various media to work, then WSB is a very simple, easy and comprehensive tool to backup your servers with.
FYI - We started out going with Veeam Backup and Replication for VMWare snapshot backups. Snapshot first and then backup, but we ran into a bad network disaster and when Microsoft was contacted to help us with our Veeam Backup restoration (which wasn't working for our AD servers) they said that they would not support any other backup other than done by their own software. This makes having Gold Certified Partner status (as Veeam has) with MS pretty useless right?
In a nutshell, how can I make MS WSB run incremental backups nightly across different SCSI hard drive backup media?
What happens is I switch out a RAID SCSI drive for each day of the week. All but 1 of the servers always finishes before the next day. The server that doesn't finish in time has over 2TB of data on it and for WSB the limit of the backup is 2TB, so I have split that server into 3 backups respectively for where the bulk of the data is located.
I can run the backup fine (to a shared folder) and instead of running INCREMENTAL as "set to" on say Monday, it runs a FULL even though its set to an incremental. Since Monday's backup copy is a manual-finger-moved-file-copy from Friday (as are all other drives also; Tues - Thurs) I believe the WSB isn't sensing it wasn't truly the last backup that it ran against, and is trying to reindex and recopy everything again. Therefore, my attempt to turn a FULL copy (daily via WSB) into an INCREMENTAL copy fails out, because it seems like WSB wants the previous drive and backup copy it ran against. IS that so? Anyone know WSB better than I do? ....particularly for the version for 2008 R2 64 bit?
If this is the case, how can I achieve a truly incremental (that will run in like 6 minutes or less each time as it does on the same exact media and same exact backup copy on that media) copy using Microsoft WSB R2 64bit (wbadmin, wbengine)?????
To me, the backup shouldn't care about the media ID (which I assume it is reading the serial number of the hard drive to get the mediaID that is saves in a file in the backup location) and should just care that it sees a previous backup copy sitting in a target folder, waiting to be updated incrementally. So how could I trick WSB into thinking that Monday's hard drive is Friday's hard drive? Find a way to change the volume serial number to that of "Friday's" disk, for everyday of the week? or if I were to restore the backup catalog of Friday's disk to Monday's disk.... would that trick it into thinking Monday's disk is Friday's (the last copy done)???
I realize this seems like a lot to go through just to back stuff up on a good media rotation, but if I can get this incremental backup over various media to work, then WSB is a very simple, easy and comprehensive tool to backup your servers with.
FYI - We started out going with Veeam Backup and Replication for VMWare snapshot backups. Snapshot first and then backup, but we ran into a bad network disaster and when Microsoft was contacted to help us with our Veeam Backup restoration (which wasn't working for our AD servers) they said that they would not support any other backup other than done by their own software. This makes having Gold Certified Partner status (as Veeam has) with MS pretty useless right?
In a nutshell, how can I make MS WSB run incremental backups nightly across different SCSI hard drive backup media?
