NTBackup Won’t Work?

The Backup Options page asks whether you want to append to or replace data on media that already contains a backup. For this example, let's overwrite the tape each time, so choose the Replace the existing backups option. In addition, because the backup also contains the server's system state information, select the check box that allows only the owner and the administrator access to the backup data, then click Next.

The Backup Label page prompts you for a backup label (which is really the backup description) and a media label. NTBackup provides generic entries based on the current date and time. However, because the backup description will appear in the backup log and in the Description column of the Restore and Manage Media tab (Windows 2003 and XP) or the Restore tab (Win2K) in NTBackup's UI, you'll want to customize the entry in the Backup label text box. For this example, enter Friday 1 Full Server Backup as the description. You'll also want to customize the media label because when you select the Replace the existing backups option on the Backup Options page, the tape will be relabeled with the label you specify in this page. For this example, enter Friday 1 in the Media label text box because you don't want the label to change. Click Next.

In the When to Back Up page, you define the backup job's name and when it should run. The name you enter for the job will be the name of the scheduled task. For this example, enter Friday 1 Full Server Backup as the job name. Click the Set Schedule button to choose the scheduling options. In the Schedule Job dialog box, you need to configure when you want the job to run. For this example, schedule the job to run at 10 p.m. on the first Friday of every month, as Figure 9 shows. When you click OK to exit the dialog box, NTBackup will prompt you for the password of the current account. Alternatively, you can specify a different account's credentials. If you enter the credentials for a different account, Windows 2003 and XP display a warning message. (You don't get a warning message in Win2K.) This message appears because the backup selection list used for the current job is saved in the current user's profile, not in the other account's profile.

The wizard's final page displays all the options you chose on the previous pages. Click Finish and NTBackup creates the scheduled job. You can view the scheduled job's command by opening it from the Control Panel Scheduled Tasks applet. As part of the scheduled job, NTBackup saves the job's selections to a backup selection list (.bks) file in the %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\data directory, where %USERPROFILE% is the profile directory for the current user, even if you specified that the job should run under a different account.

One caveat to using NTBackup's scheduling feature is that if an NTBackup job is scheduled to use a particular tape, that tape must be in the drive at the time the job starts. For example, if you leave the Thursday 1 tape in the drive and your scheduled Friday 1 backup job starts, NTBackup will abort the job because it requires the Friday 1 tape.

With NT 4.0's NTBackup utility, you could back up to an arbitrary tape, overwriting the tape's contents with the current backup. In XP and Win2K, NTBackup documentation mentions that you can do so only if you run NTBackup from the command line and you use the /um (unmanaged) option. This option lets NTBackup use the first tape it can find. As such, it's suitable for use only with standalone tape drives. This option isn't documented in Windows 2003, but my testing shows that it works.

Keep in mind that if you use the /um option in a scheduled job, the tape will be relabeled with either the label you specify with the /n option or a default label if you don't specify the /n option. If you forget to change tapes between jobs, be aware that your tape's media label might change. For this reason, Microsoft recommends not using /n with /um to avoid duplicate logical media labels. For more details about this recommendation, see the Microsoft article "How to Schedule Unattended Backups by Using a Stand-Alone Tape Library" (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314844). Also, /um can't be combined with /a, so you can't append to existing tapes using /um. For more information about NTBackup's command-line options, see the sidebar "Running NTBackup from the Command Line."

How to Remove a Failed Tape
When a tape fails in your rotation, you'll probably want to remove the failed tape's entry from the drive's media pool. If you don't do this and you prepare a new tape for NTBackup with the same media label, you'll have two identically named entries in the Removable Storage database. This situation is not only confusing but also has a more serious consequence: Scripted backups that use the /t (tape name) option will fail because NTBackup won't know which tape to use.

Before preparing the replacement tape, you need to tell the Removable Storage service that the tape no longer belongs to NTBackup by deallocating the failed tape's entry. To do this, open the Removable Storage console, right-click the tape that failed, choose All Tasks, then click Deallocate. When you're prompted to confirm this operation, choose Yes. Next, move the failed tape's entry to the free media pool by dragging and dropping the failed tape's entry into the free media pool for your media type, then click Yes in the confirmation prompt. After the unmounted tape's entry is in the free media pool, you can delete it from the Removable Storage database.

The Idiosyncrasies Revealed
The NTBackup utility in Win2K and later is a much more versatile tool than its NT counterpart because of its media-management and scheduling features. Although NTBackup still lacks many enterprise-friendly features, such as administrative status notifications, it's adequate for most small installations. I hope that the information I presented here explains some of its idiosyncrasies and paves the way to a successful backup strategy.