Install and overview of Windows Server Backup

- [Instructor] I'm on a Windows 2022 server where I'm going to install Windows Server Backup. So I'm in Server Manager and what's interesting about Windows Server Backup as a feature, it's already showing up in my tools menu which is the only tool that actually shows up when you haven't installed it yet. So if I go to Local Backup, you can see that it's not yet installed, so we need to install it. So I'll click on Add Roles and Features and the Wizard shows up. I'll click Next until I get to Features. And now I'm in Features. So I'll scroll down to Windows Server Backup and click Next and Install. Windows Server Backup has some unusual quirks about it. You can't back up other servers when using Windows Server Backup. It will only back up itself. However, it can back up to a network share. It can back up to a NAS device, a SAN device. It can even back up to the cloud. But most popularly you're going to see people backing it up to say a USB drive or internal storage. And then you can copy it to the cloud from there if you'd like. So that way you have both a local backup as well as a cloud backup. The first time you run a full backup on Windows Server it's going to back up all the different files but then the second time it runs, if you're running on a schedule, it's not going to run a full backup. It's just going to run an incremental backup which are any files that have changed since the last backup. And then when you go to do a Full Server Restore, let's say it's a month or two or even longer later, then what it does is it does a synthetic restoration where it takes the full backup and all the incremental changes, uses the latest files and then it does the restoration using that complete backup. Okay, it's all done. So I'll click on Tools, choose Windows Server Backup from the list, and once that opens up, now it should look a little different. While that's getting ready, I want to go down to File Explorer and just double check that I have storage that I can use to send all this great data. So I've got lots of different backup devices such as my H Drive, F Drive, that kind of thing. So I'll close that and now I'm going to wait for this to complete and we'll run a backup. I'm going to choose a Backup Once option where I'm just going to back up a single file or folder and we see that the Scheduled Backup is grayed out because we're just doing the backup once and I'm going to choose the different options. Click next. I don't want to do a full server at this time. I'm going to choose custom. So you do have some granularity to these backups. Now I'll choose the Add Items and I can expand and choose a single file, or I can choose a folder. I'll choose the user's folders. So I'll click Okay. And if I click on Advanced Settings then I can choose exclusions. So let's say I don't want to back up all the files in the user's folder. I just want to skip certain files that maybe I just don't need. Well, there's no need for me to do that. Then you have volume shadow settings. And what this is going to do is a Volume Shadow Copy Backup. So of what volume shadow does is it doesn't back up the file that's active. So if someone has that file open, say on another computer then if it tried to back that up, it could corrupt the file. So what it does is it makes a copy of that file and then you back up the copy rather than the original. So that's fine the way that's set up. I'll click Next. And now I want to choose a local drive. So I can choose a remote shared folder or I can choose the local drive. I'll choose the local drive at the dropdown. And I know that the H drive has plenty of space. So I'll click Next and I'm just backing up the user's folder, and now it's running the backup. Now, depending on how much data you're backing up it could take anywhere from a few minutes to many hours. If the backup drive is empty, then you will get the option to have what's called a dedicated drive. And a dedicated drive disappears from File Explorer. You won't even see it. However, this particular drive must have already had some files on it, so it did not give me that option. And the advantage of having the dedicated drive is no one can go in and see it and accidentally delete it or even purposefully delete it. So it does give you a little bit of extra security. However, of course, if they went into the backup program and they had rights to be able to do that then they would be able to make changes if they wanted to. At this point in the backup what it's doing is it's just adding up how much data needs to be backed up and it's indexing all the files. So you can see it's so far found, well, almost 800 now, over 800 files climbing. And you can see the amount of megabytes that go with it. Now, it could get up into the gigabytes as well if it's a lot of files and folders. Once it's done indexing all those files then it's going to switch over to copying the files. And then it should show up in File Explorer under that drive letter. The indexing has completed and now the backup is happening. And strangely enough, the indexing can sometimes take longer than the backup itself, just depending on how much data. And if you have a lot of small files or if you have a few bigger files. Indexing a lot of small files takes a lot of time. However, indexing a few files doesn't. So in this particular case, in the user's folder there's a lot of different profile files, which are just small text files. So that's why it takes a little bit longer. And now it says the backup is complete, although sometimes there's a little bit of housekeeping that needs to happen once it's done. And now I can click Close. I'm going to go into the H Drive and you can see the Windows Image Backup is in there. And that's the backup server name. And you can see there is all the backup data and the log files that go along with it. Installing Windows Server Backup allows you to back up a single window server in a variety of ways.