Failure modes of various automated uses of ntbackup

[James A. Bowery]

It seems to me that all of the recommended uses of ntbackup have nasty
failure modes when AUTOMATED with REWRITABLE media such as networked
USB drives. By "nasty" I mean simple things like your backup can be
destroyed if a power outtage occurs during ntbackup's run. There all
kinds of naive ways around this that don't work -- such as: "Well, just
do incrementals!" which begs the question of what happens when run out
of room on the networked USB drive (remember -- this is supposed to be
AUTOMATED, ie: ntbackup runs UNATTENDED at scheduled times).

What I'm doing to get around this failure mode is 2 full backups per
system to a networked USB drive with times staggered so they don't
overlap with each other.

This seems to be the simplest way to completely and reasonably reliably
automate ntbackup with networked USB drives. It seems there must be
some better way of fully automating ntbackup with networked USB drives
I don't know about/haven't thought of.

PS: Windows Onecare can't handle networked backup drives.

PPS: Yes I know there are a lot of backup software products out there.
I'm not asking about those here.

 

[Paul Mckenna]

What I do is run a scheduled task which run a batch file which if the
current backup file exists it's deletes the old one then renames the current
one to an old one, next time ntbackup runs it creates a new file and so the
cycle continues, obviously you could say keep five old backups on your USB
drive and create a batch file which deletes the oldest one and renames the
others(depending on space) then you would have to have a power outage 5 days
in a row while the backup was happening to may them all unusable.

Hope this helps

 

[Paul Mckenna]

Probably more simple if you had enough room for 5 backups you can just
create a separate backup routine for Mon - Fri in NTbackup which overwrites
the existing days file.

If you USB drive only has enough room for one backup then maybe you want a
bigger one.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

It seems to me that all of the recommended uses of ntbackup have nasty
failure modes when AUTOMATED with REWRITABLE media such as networked
USB drives. By "nasty" I mean simple things like your backup can be
destroyed if a power outtage occurs during ntbackup's run. There all
kinds of naive ways around this that don't work -- such as: "Well, just
do incrementals!" which begs the question of what happens when run out
of room on the networked USB drive (remember -- this is supposed to be
AUTOMATED, ie: ntbackup runs UNATTENDED at scheduled times).

What I'm doing to get around this failure mode is 2 full backups per
system to a networked USB drive with times staggered so they don't
overlap with each other.

This seems to be the simplest way to completely and reasonably reliably
automate ntbackup with networked USB drives. It seems there must be
some better way of fully automating ntbackup with networked USB drives
I don't know about/haven't thought of.

PS: Windows Onecare can't handle networked backup drives.

PPS: Yes I know there are a lot of backup software products out there.
I'm not asking about those here.

And what exactly is your question?

 

[James A. Bowery]

And what exactly is your question?

What is the aforementioned 'way'?

 

[Malke]

What is the aforementioned 'way'?

Use a different backup program that can do what you want. NTBackup was
designed many, many years ago to work with Windows NT and tape backups. It
doesn't have the capabilities you want.

Malke

 

[James A. Bowery]

Yes, I know it isn't really reasonable to expect the largest software
company in the world with control of the most operating system
installations to provide a program that fulfills the backup needs of
most its customer base.

I was just having a bit of fun.

 

[Rock]

Yes, I know it isn't really reasonable to expect the largest software
company in the world with control of the most operating system
installations to provide a program that fulfills the backup needs of
most its customer base.

I was just having a bit of fun.

MS get's hammered all the time from 3rd party software companies about
including too much in the OS - can you say monopoly? Just go with another
backup solution and move on with things.

Note, they did make changes and update the backup in Vista but many people
are not happy with it. It does some things nice but again has certain
limitations that can be irritating. Whether this was because of the same
considerations as above, I don't know.