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!
Best Answer
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 usewbadmin
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:
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.