Windows – How to automatically backup Windows event logs

You could run it silently using a Windows Script file instead. The Run Method allows you running a script in invisible mode. Create a .vbs file like this one

Dim WinScriptHost
Set WinScriptHost = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WinScriptHost.Run Chr(34) & "C:\Scheduled Jobs\mybat.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WinScriptHost = Nothing

and schedule it. The second argument in this example sets the window style. 0 means "hide the window."

Complete syntax of the Run method:

 object.Run(strCommand, [intWindowStyle], [bWaitOnReturn])

Arguments:

• object: WshShell object.
• strCommand: String value indicating the command line you want to run. You must include any parameters you want to pass to the executable file.
• intWindowStyle: Optional. Integer value indicating the appearance of the program's window. Note that not all programs make use of this information.
• bWaitOnReturn: Optional. Boolean value indicating whether the script should wait for the program to finish executing before continuing to the next statement in your script. If set to true, script execution halts until the program finishes, and Run returns any error code returned by the program. If set to false (the default), the Run method returns immediately after starting the program, automatically returning 0 (not to be interpreted as an error code).

It seems like most people don't know about this feature, but Windows will rotate the log files automatically if so-configured. Look for "AutoBackupLogFiles" in this file.

You can configure this on a server-for-server basis, but that's tedious for a large number of servers. I created an Administrative Template to set this on server computers, and then scripted a startup script to add a scheduled task to periodically pick up, ZIP, and move the log files to a retention location. It worked really well, and was cheap!

http://mx02.wellbury.com/misc/EventLogPolicy.adm