SBS 2003 Backup Hack

I wanted to write and share a Windows Small Business Server 2003 backup tip with my reader(s) (is it possible I have more than 1 yet?). Since I am somewhat active in the SBS community, and I tend to listen to our Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), you can thank Wayne Small for asking questions about this. Wayne mentioned he wanted to backup to USB 2.0 hard drives during the day, and Tape drives at night. Interesting concept, I guess you can't be too secure with your backups right?

This got me thinking about my home setup, I have a tape drive and a USB hard drive: can I use both?

I wanted to backup to USB Monday through Saturday, then on Sunday, backup to tape (primarily so I could take the tape offsite on Monday morning). I quickly realized that adding a scheduled task to simply run NTBackup to tape wasn't going to display the backup status in the SBS Monitoring Reports. I needed another plan.

Outlined below is my solution that is currently implemented on my home SBS machine. Just to be clear, this procedure is not endorsed by Microsoft, or the SBS team.
The first step is to create some registry files that we can use to "toggle" the backup media.

1. Configure SBS backup (using the wizard) to backup to the USB disk


2. Export HKLM\software\Microsoft\smallbusinessserver\backup to BackupToDisk.reg and save this in the "%sbsprogramdir%\backup" directory


3. Configure SBS backup (using the wizard) to backup to the Tape drive


4. Export HKLM\software\Microsoft\smallbusinessserver\backup to BackupToTape.reg and save this to the "%sbsprogramdir%\backup" directory

The next step is to take advantage of these registry files. In my case, I ran the Backup Wizard and scheduled to disk 7 days a week. Next, I scheduled a separate task, following the steps below, for Sunday before the backup and Monday before the backup to toggle to Tape and then back again.

When you choose to toggle the backup media, schedule a task that runs the following command line: regedit /s "%sbsprogramdir%\backup\BackupToTape.reg" or regedit /s "%sbsprogramdir%\backup\BackupToDisk.reg" depending on which media you want to target.

That's all there is to it: hacky, but effective. Now the backup to disk and the backup to tape appear in the SBS Monitoring reports, and are easily monitored via email.

Finally, don't forget to attach the backup logs to the SBS Monitoring reports, so in the event you had a failure, you can just check what happened directly from your Inbox.

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UPDATE
I wanted to update this article to reflect something Steven T. found when working on his own solution of this, and it's something that I just missed from the start. So thanks Steve!

One of the comments he had was around the "Last Log File ID" and "Last Backup ID" registry keys. We probably shouldn't be replacing those each time we flop between disk and tape. My suggestion would be to open both of the .reg files created above and remove these (using notepad) from the .reg file. Thus they will not be replaced each time the script runs.

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