What The?????? Exchange 2007 and Windows Server 2008 Backup
<rant>
Ok, I'm in a bit of shock. I normally only have nice things to say about Microsoft and their products, and I've always stood behind them 100%. But I'm upset today, so I'm going to have a bit of a rant and explain why...
I've been planning my migration from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 which was released last week. On my test machine, I got Exchange 2007 SP1 installed and configured no problems. Just before I was about to change the production system over, I thought "it's probably a good idea to test the backup", since I remember seeing something about a new backup system in Windows Server 2008.
Before I go on, I should outline my current backup arrangements. I currently use NTBackup on Windows Server 2003 to backup my server and Exchange Mailboxes. I don't backup everything, as I have a large amount of data that I don't really care about (several TBs), so I select the important things I need to backup like programs, personal folders, and system files and settings. I backup to a local 2TB array on my system. Its not an unusual setup, and certainly not a complex arrangement. Most importantly it does exactly what I need it to.
So... I fire up the new Windows Server Backup console and get ready to configure my backup jobs. The first problem I noticed was it gave me 2 options.
Option 1: Full Server (recommended) - I want to back up all my server data, applications, and system state
Well, thank you mister wizard, but no, I don't want to back all that up, what other options do we have?
Option 2: Custom - I want to exclude some volumes from this backup.
Erm... well I want to exclude some files and folders, not an entire volume, what other options do we have?
(insert deafening silence here)
That's it! They were my options. Surely not! After a bit of research, I find that there is a command line tool wbadmin.exe that allows a few more options than the GUI (I have a real problem with this move away from the GUI back to the command line - if I wanted to spend my life at a command prompt, I'd become a linux sysadmin... this isn't what I signed up for - but that's a post for other day). Perhaps I can specify a config file of some sort to tell it exactly what I want backed up? Searching through the rather pitiful documentation on Technet reveals that its actually as useless to me as the GUI. There is simply no support for backing up individual files or folders.
So ok, maybe I could shuffle some data around the various volumes and work around this inconvenience. Lets test a backup and see what the Exchange restore process is like. The backup was relatively fast, and I proceeded to use the wizard to walk me through the recovery process. I was presented with the following options
Errrm... Applications appears to be disabled. Did Exchange get backed up? I opened up the mailbox store folder to see if the transactions logs have cleared as they do after a successful full backup. Nope... still there... how bizzare! Time to do some research.
I came across this post, at which point, I was ready to cry. No support for Exchange at all with Windows Server Backup. No support for backing up individual files or folders. Further research reveals that even the ability to backup to tape has been removed from Windows Server Backup. I can't see anything that relates to differential or incremental backups either. I could not agree more with Elan that Windows Server Backup is complete garbage.
To add insult to injury, I went looking for a copy of System Centre Data Protection Manager 2007 (which is supposed to support Windows Server 2008 and Exchange 2007) on the Technet Plus Subscription Site. All that was there was a copy of DPM beta 2 from mid last year.
So I've now shut down my Windows Server 2008 test box. I've thrown my toys out of the sandpit for now. I know a lot of people that complain about NTBackup, and it was less than ideal in a lot of respects, but it came with the OS and it got the job done. Now, it has been replaced by something that is 100% useless. How on earth did this get approved as the backup solution to be released with Microsoft's latest and greatest server OS? Who in their right minds thought "Wow, what a quality piece of software. Lets approve this for release!"?
Get your act together Microsoft... this is a joke.
</rant>
