Backup is a royal pain in the net. There’s a lot of backup software out there. Some good, some not so good.
Windows Server Backup (or ntbackup) is marginally useful and dangerous at worst. I’ve seen it set up at some small shops, mostly because it’s free, but I have two main pain points with it.
First of all, Windows Server Backup will not back up to drives with 4 KiB sectors. We had a customer who was backing up to a USB drive that failed. We brought in a new USB drive, that had 4 KiB sectors, and it would not back up. Googling found lots of angry people but no solutions. That, and the fact that it’s nigh on impossible to find out if a drive has 4 KiB or 512 B sectors before buying, makes this an ongoing problem.
Let me repeat that, in case that happened to glide past you. The backup destination drive, i.e. where the backup images themselves are stored, i.e. not the drive being backed up, has to have 512 B sectors. This is insane. Why would software ever need to care so deeply about where the files are being stored? There’s probably a limitation saying that the drives to back up also have to be 512 B, but don’t quote me on that. I haven’t tried.
Second, Windows Server Backup has no sensible way of telling you when backup fails. This is insane. You setup a backup solution, it seems to work, then something or other breaks, and it fails, writing an event to an event log that nobody reads often enough to notice. This makes it dangerous, unless you have as a procedure to read your event logs daily at best, or at the very least on a regular basis (not just reading them in the case of a problem). At worst, the problem can persist for months or even years until your main drives actually fail, and you’re caught with your pants down with no recent backup.
Microsoft’s strategy to deal with this piece of suck is to put it out to pasture, pretend it doesn’t exist and not fixing any problems.
Now, I’m told that you can set up alerting on errors with Windows Server Backup in different ways – one way I’ve heard is using Task Scheduler to trigger sending an e-mail on different Event IDs using a script.
The problem is, I don’t trust myself not to screw this up. You basically have to know in advance what log events to be looking for, i.e. enumerate all possible bad conditions, before sending out logs. This is not something individual sysadmins should need to do, that’s the job of whoever makes the software. Besides, I’m not likely to do that kind of work for software that won’t even back up to (i.e. store backup files on!) 4 KiB drives, and that Microsoft considers dead.
So… whenever I see it, I try to get it ripped out and replaced. With what? Well… that’s a good question…