NTBackup Commands

backupntbackup

I am pretty unfamiliar with doing NTbackup via command line but I have a user who had someone setup his computer to backup to a 1TB external drive.

The backup command looks like this:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntbackup.exe backup "@C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\data\User Backup.bks" ^
  /a /d "Set created 1/7/2011 at 12:12 PM" /v:no /r:no /rs:no /hc:off /m normal ^
  /j "User Backup" /l:s /f "I:\UserComputerBackup\UserBackup.bkf"

This user has used all the space on his 1TB Drive. My question is – is there a way to specify NTBackup to to only keep the last 3 or 4 backups and overwrite anything older?

I know this is available in some software backup solutions – but this was done using ntbackup originally and I'd like to continue to do that.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

My question is - is there a way to specify NTBackup to to only keep the last 3 or 4 backups and overwrite anything older?

No sorry, ntbackup is a very light weight backup. It doesn't have keep track of versions or anything, so there is nothing in NTbackup that allows this. If you want to continue using NTBackup you will have to address its limitations using external scripts/tools.

I wrote a little python script which I used until we upgraded to Windows 2008 to schedule/manage ntbackup. You define your backup details in an xml file and the python tool will run the ntbackup with the correct option. You set the number of versions you want to keep and so on.

Related Topic