Windows Server Backup (R2)

[mitchell1981]

Hi All,

I now have all our servers moved over to Windows Server 2008 R2, and all is good. Our backup software was incompatible so I thought I would experiment with Windows Server Backup and actually, for most of our servers it is great. It's really simple to use and dead easy to restore from. Obviously not much good for Exchange or SQL but for basic file servers it seems to do the job.

Only thing I can't work out is how it decides whether or not to do a full or incremental backup (it is all automatic). We have two very similar servers set up. Both just file servers sharing two volumes.

On one server, WSB does a full backup of each volume each time. On the other server it has done one full backup and then followed it up with incrementals. The second scenario is what we want.

Anyone got any idea how it determines which type of backup to do? Both servers are configured exactly the same as far as I know and both are running VSS on their shares.

Thanks.

[ZeroHour]

Hi
It has to be a config issue I think, the wizard for setting up a job lets you select the mode I think but I have not had too much experience with R2 yet. At least in 2008 the options were in the wizard.

Good luck

[bio]

After the first full backup is created, you can configure Windows Server Backup to automatically run incremental backups by saving only the data that has changed since the last backup. So i think you have ran a full backup first on the HADLOW server (for testing or so).. and then created a new backup task. This is why the 2 jobs are different.

bio..