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I have a WS2008 R2 box that does local backups of all my PCs, databases, etc. I do replication to a few drives. I want to be able to backup across the network, offsite, to say a drive at my office or home. I can't find any documentation that does this. Can WS2008 do this? If so, can someone provide me with some documentation? Otherwise I was thinking of setting up a local back up, creating a scheduler that calls a bat file witch then FTPs the file somewhere. Would that work? I want to go this route only if there are no options with WS2008.

Thanks in advance!

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Create a backup job using wbadmin specifically with the -backuptarget switch i.e. -backuptarget:\\servername\sharename

Unfortunately, wbadmin requires the share to be a UNC path, so other network storage filers are excluded. But really, did you want to push your backup across a network using FTP? Of course you didn't. When asking yourself "Can Windows backup to $n storage service?" reverse the question and ask "Can $n storage service be presented to Windows as a local drive or UNC path?" If the latter question can be answered in the affirmative, then you can use wbadmin to backup to it either locally or across the network.

If you're more into PowerShell (which anyone administering Windows boxxen should be), have a look at how to add PowerShell cmdlets that can manage Windows Server backups. There's quite a gamut of them:

Add-WBBackupTarget
Add-WBBareMetalRecovery
Add-WBFileSpec
Add-WBSystemState
Add-WBVolume
Get-WBBackupSet
Get-WBBackupTarget
Get-WBBareMetalRecovery
Get-WBDisk
Get-WBFileSpec
Get-WBJob
Get-WBPolicy
Get-WBSchedule
Get-WBSummary
Get-WBSystemState
Get-WBVolume
Get-WBVssBackupOptions
New-WBBackupTarget
New-WBFileSpec
New-WBPolicy
Remove-WBBackupTarget
Remove-WBBareMetalRecovery
Remove-WBFileSpec
Remove-WBPolicy
Remove-WBSystemState
Remove-WBVolume
Set-WBPolicy
Set-WBSchedule
Set-WBVssBackupOptions
Start-WBBackup

It should be noted that the PowerShell cmdlets do not support backing up to removable media. You'll need to fall back on wbadmin for that. They do, however, support network targets.

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  • This is great, thank you! I have lots to try out tomorrow. As a side note is it possible to use these tools to also back up directly to something like S3? Or do I still need to use a tool like gladinet and mount the drives to the cloud and have the backup service dump the files in those drives?
    – northpole
    Jan 27, 2012 at 5:04
  • @northpole The Windows backup tool can only backup to a UNC path. You'll need to present your S3 bucket to the backup utility as a UNC path. So, that simplifies the possibilities. Whatever you have to do to access S3 as a UNC path is whatever you have to do.
    – Wesley
    Jan 27, 2012 at 5:11

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