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AielloJFlag for United States of America

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Server 2008 - Need to schedule Weekly Full & Daily Incremental Backups

It seems like this should be simple.  I need to schedule the following backups:

1) A weekly Full backup that runs every Friday night at 11 PM
2) A daily Incremental backup that runs Monday through Thursday nights at 11 PM

I successfully created two scheduled tasks called Daily Incremental and Weekly Full that ran correctly.  Deleting the default scheduled task Backup Small Business Server caused the Server Management Console - Backup Snap In to fail.  Restoring the default task name appears to limit me to only one of two very basic strategies (No advanced options presented for full vs incremental) but gets the snap in to work properly.

Please advise how to achieve the weekly full and daily incremental backups with a working backups Snap In.

Thanks in advance.

AielloJ
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univision-computers

Are you backing up to tape or hard drive?
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Backing up to USB 2.0 hard drives.
SBS 2008 changed the way it does backups from the traditional way that you are expecting.

Essentially you set up the external hard drive(s) as "backup destinations" in the SBS Backup Console and it then "hides" the drive from Windows Explorer.  You will only see the USB drive listed in disk management - no longer in My Computer.  This is normal.  Then your first backup is a "full" and every other backup is essentially an incremental.  In reality they are actually "snapshots" of your hard drive, similar to Hyper-V if you are familiar with that.  There are no options that you can configure, it just overwrites the oldest incremental backup automatically when the drive fills up.  It is meant to be simple and foolproof and it does work extremely well.  You are only limited to the size of the drive and the amount of data regarding how far back you can restore.  It is often many months at a time that can be held on one external HD.  I hope that helps!
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univision-computers:

Yech!!!  All these attempts to simplify by Microsoft by taking away options makes me uneasy.

I actually had Full and Incremental backups occurring by having scheduled tasks that ran Full backups every Friday, and incrementals Monday through Thursday.  The only problem was the Backup Snap In no loger functioned.  This worried the client who checked the prior nights backup status every morning.

I can live with the drive being hidden and all that.  My biggest issue is not having a simple way to control or force a Full backup.  The client has a different USB drive for each day of the week and changes them daily.

They're trying to oversimplify a business with a server.  In my mind those two things don't usually go together.

I'll have to chew on this a bit.

Thanks,

AielloJ
Multiple hard drives work very well also.  If the backup program recognizes that there is no full backup yet on a new hard drive then it will make one the first day.  Then each day thereafter, it will do an incremental, snapshot backup.  Each hard drive will have enough data to restore from.
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univision-computers:

That would be an acceptable solution.  The only thing I'd have to do is somehow set it up it to delete the backup on the Friday drive.  This would have to be automated as this is a very non-technical client.

The real bugger is having two scheduled tasks that do exactly what I need them to do, except there must be a scheduled task of a particular name or the backup snap in in the Management Console won't work.  I'm curious if it will let me setup the task name it's expecting to do nothing, and have the real work done by the other two tasks.

AielloJ
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univision-computers

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