Backup Strategy with PowerShell and ntbackup

About once a year, I spend about a day going doing preventative maintenance on my development servers.  Today is that day.  I've had basic backups being done via a scheduled task an NTBACKUP, these seem to work, but luckily I've never needed them.  What I didn't like was that although my SQL Server backups send me emails I look for each morning, my file backups didn't.  I did a little research on some programs out there, anything that I would trust for this kind of stuff seemed rather expensive so I decided that I could take this opportunity to learn Windows PowerShell and create my own little backup strategy...disclaimer, although this process seems solid, in no-way-shape-or-form will Software Logistics be liable if you attempt to mimic this process and for some reason you may loose data.  If you continue on reading, we'll just assume that you'll accept this disclaimer and won't try to take my house if something goes wrong!

Here's my setup...

1. I have a Windows 2003 R2 Server acting as my Virtual Machine Host, off of this machine I have a decent 200GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive.
2. Download Windows PowerShell 1.0
3. I've downloaded the program that helped write my scripts PowerShell IDE there might be something a little better, but this seems to work.
4. I already had the backups setup on my SQL & Exchange servers, so on those boxes I created a network share called \Backups.
5. Now on my USB Hard Drive I created two directories:
   • J:\BackupJobs
   • J:\Backups
6. In the J:\BackupJobs directory I created my Power Shell File J:\BackupJobs\ProcessBackups.ps1
7. Then I started to create my script...this really isn't intended as a PowerShell tutorial, but you should be able to get enough out of this to complete your scripts, but basically it does the following:
   1. Create a new Time & Date Stamp directory like J:\Backup\01272007, this will be stored into a variable called "$BackupPath"
   2. Create a variable called "$Body" that will be used to hold the log file for all activities, this will be written to disk with the script
      • $body | Out-File -FilePath $logFile
   3. Create a Variable that holds the individual file name like
      • $UserBackupFileName = $BackupPath + "\UserData.bkf"
   4. Now start my backup process
      • ntbackup backup "\\sl1\users /J "User Data Backup Job" /f $UserBackupFileName | out-null
   5. The piping (|) into the out-null will make sure that the process (ntbackup) completes before moving on to the next step.
   6. Once this completes, I write an entry into the log file with the files names and Paths as well as the completion time.
   7. I then just complete steps 3-6 for the rest of the directories to be backed up.
   8. After everything is backed up, I want to do a little cleanup, here's the process there:
      • Create a new variable called $OldBackup based upon the current date $OldBackup = Get-Date
      • Add -5 days to that via $OldBackup = $OldBackup.AddDays(-5)
      • Now create the Path $OldBackupPath = "J:\Backups\" + $OldBackup.ToString("MMddyyyy")
      • Now we just make sure it exists if([System.IO.Directory]::Exists($OldBackupPath))
      • And if so just blow it away! [System.IO.Directory]::Delete($OldBackupPath,$TRUE)
   9. Once I do all of this I just send my self an email with log data, something like:

      1. $mailServer = New-Object "System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient"
         $mailServer.Host = "MyMail.Server.Com"
         $mailServer.Port = 25
         $msg = New-Object "System.Net.Mail.MailMessage"
         $msg.To.Add("BackupAdmin@MyCompany.com")
         $msg.From = "Backup.Service@MyCompany.net"
         $msg.Subject = "Backup Completed"
         $msg.Body = $body
         $mailServer.Send($msg)

And now my backup is completed!

This was really my first in-depth powershell experience and it wasn't too painful, I'm sure there is plenty of room for optimization but hey it's Saturday and this seems to work!

-ec