What I'm looking for, is info on what is contained in the server 2008 system state backup. It is incredibly large (10+ G), and annoying to backup remotely. is there a way to take a full system state, and then do like a weekly incremental?
I know the wbadmin tool, but its options are limited.
I'm also looking for the option to remove the 2nd or 3rd oldest backup.
Thanks for the updates. I have a few other questions:
1) How does everyone deal with backing up the system state for server 2008? What is your procedure?
2) We deal with over 100 separate networks, all with different configurations (hardware, OS, network, etc) and some servers have additional physical drives, and some do not. If what Jim said/linked is correct, and it has to be a local drive to avoid backing up the 10G of system state, are there any ways around this? I've heard you can edit the registry and allow wbadmin to backup the system state to the same drive, but I don't want that to be our workaround. Also, if it doesn't allow the incremental backup to a USB drive, I really don't want every system state to be appx 10G, and then try and uploading that offsite every time.
Thanks for the help everyone!
Best Answer
My wbadmin backup is also 10Gig on Windows 2008 64 bit. Tom's list short a few things i.e. the .NET framework files (on 64 bit also the 32 bit .NET FW files, which helps getting to 10G) and task scheduler files. This MSDN link (and this one) may help. Note also that some new Win 2008 based Domain Controllers will run DFSR instead of FRS, so it needs to be considered in the equation also.
Wbadmin makes use of the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to do the system state backup. It basically takes a VSS snapshot and gathers all the files together in a VHD file. There will be backup solutions out there that offer VSS based system state backups that will do the same as wbadmin but give incremental functionality and even Single instance storage e.g. Attix5. Most of the system state files really does not change very often like all the driver files, so you should get a huge drop in backup size after a full backup was done initially.
If you feel strong you can probably look into a tool that can extract files from VHD files or mount VHD files as windows drives and the use some backup tool to backup the exposed files.