The theory of automating the ASR backup on a Windows 2003 Server

OK so if you have read my previous Blog post you will know how handy it is to keep a copy of an ASR backup. However at this point we have been looking at this as a manual process by starting the "ntbackup" application and running the ASR Wizard. So first of all in this Blog I am going to explain some of the problems associated with trying to automate this process and at a high level look at ways of getting round the problems. In a follow up Blog I will post the actual technicalities of getting the automated method to work.

So let's look at the first problem which is telling the Windows Backup Utility from a command line to run an ASR backup with user intervention. I am sure you will know but running "ntbackup /?" will show a list of parameters available from the command line. What isn't documented however is "ntbackup asrbackup" command. With this one command we have solved the first hurdle of automating the backup.

The second and perhaps most complex issue however is that of the floppy disk. Let's consider first the problematic scenario in that the server has no floppy disk. If we manually ran the ASR backup this wouldn't actually be a problem as we could just cancel out when prompted for a floppy disk at the end of the backup. The next problem is if the server actually does have a floppy disk drive. Most administrators would not want to leave a floppy disk in the drive for various reasons not least if the server rebooted and the boot order was set to start from a floppy disk. Before explaining how I get round these two issues I will point out one more thing. As far as these instructions go at the moment you don't need a floppy disk drive on the server to create the backup. However if your machine does not have a physical floppy disk drive you will need a USB floppy drive during the recovery operation. In a future Blog I intend to cover any potential methods of getting round this problem and would like to hear from people who have worked out a way round this problem. At the moment I keep one USB drive for all of the machines with no floppy drive.

So to address the first problem I use some virtual floppy disk drive software. This mounts a virtual drive A: that the backup can write to at the end of the process.

Second on machines with a physical floppy disk drive I also use the virtual floppy drive. However before doing this I disable the physical floppy disk drive using the Microsoft DEVCON utility. When the ASR backup has finished I enable the physical device.

And finally in this stage the actual ASR backup job is run using the built in Windows scheduler.

Before stopping the virtual floppy disk drive I copy the contents from it to a subdirectory of the backup. This saves me having to extract the files needed for the floppy disk from the actual backup file.

As for the storage of the ASR backups I use a network attached USB device that is shared from a machine. This way I don't even need to copy the backup when I need to recover a system, its already on a device I can attach to the damaged machine.

So that's it in theory. In my next Blog post I will put this together showing which utilities and commands I actually use. If you have any comments or ideas on how this process can be improved on please let me know via the comments section.