Backing Up the Windows Server 2008 R2 Environment : Managing Backups Using the Command-Line Utility wbadmin.exe and PowerShell Cmdlets

Understanding and becoming familiar and fluent with the command-line options of wbadmin.exe is very useful for administrators who need to manage Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core systems or who need advanced automation capabilities. The following sections detail a few common tasks that can be performed using wbadmin.exe.

Viewing Backup History

To view the backup history of a system, perform the following steps:

To perform the same task using Windows PowerShell, perform the following steps:

Running a Manual Backup to Remote Storage Using wbadmin.exe

Using wbadmin.exe to run backups can be tedious. To understand each of the options available for a manual backup in a Command Prompt window, type wbadmin.exe Start Backup /? and press Enter. To run a manual backup and store it on a remote server share, a few options are required. The data will be stored on the remote server share \\Server30\NetworkBackup, the Bare Metal Recovery item, referred to as the AllCritical option used in our example, will be selected for backup. This item includes all volumes in use by the system, including volumes that contain applications and shared data folders, as well as the System State. For this example, the companyabc\administrator account will be used to connect to the remote share. To run the manual backup using the preceding criteria, perform the following steps:

To perform the previous backup task using Windows PowerShell is a much more detailed task and requires several steps to make this work. To perform a manual backup to a network share capable of Bare Metal Recovery, perform the following steps:

1.	Log on to the Windows Server 2008 R2 system with an account with administrator privileges.
2.	Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, click the Windows PowerShell folder, right-click on Windows PowerShell, and select Run As Administrator.
3.	Type cd \ and press Enter.
4.	Type Add-PsSnapin Windows.ServerBackup and press Enter.
5.	Type $BMRPolicy=New-WbPolicy and press Enter.
6.	Type $BMRCred=Get-Credential and press Enter.
7.	A Windows dialog box opens; enter the username and password combination that will be used to connect to the network share, and click OK to save the credentials and return to the PowerShell window.
8.	Back in the PowerShell window, type $NetShareBackup=New-WbBackupTarget –NetworkPath \\Server30\NetworkBackup -Credential $BMRCred and press Enter.
9.	Type Add-WbBackupTarget –policy $BMRPolicy –Target $NetShareBackup and press Enter.
10.	Type Add-WbBareMetalRecovery –policy $BMRPolicy and press Enter.
11.	Type Start-WbBackup –policy $BMRPolicy and press Enter. The backup should start, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. Running a manual backup to a network share using PowerShell.