Remote Backup Fail and How to Silently Copy Files

JD Long — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:33:01 +0000

Today I called my firms desktop support to talk to them about how to get Iron Mountain Connected Backup to archive files located somewhere other than [C:\Documents and Settings\user\] and through talking with my desktop support guy I discovered that it doesn’t support that. Oh, and by the way it’s a “desktop backup” so it’s not backup up my MS Access files or Outlook PST files. I told the guy that I had gone in and made sure it was backing those files up and they were checked in the UI. He informed me that it may look like they are backed up, but I can’t restore them. To which I responded “Any developer who writes backup software that will backup a file it can’t restore should be kicked squarely in the nuts and then never allowed near a computer for life” I’m not kidding. Honest to god I would kick an Iron Mountain developer right in the baby maker for passing this piece of shit program off as “enterprise ready.” The only way this program could be more useless is if it actually deleted files from my PC instead of backing them up. If the software is crippled because they are selling it as a “desktop backup” then, by god, they better tell me that in big fucking blinking letters and a marching band playing John Philip Sousa on my lap.

Alternatives: I’ve been running Jungle Disk at home and really like it. I could use that at work except I have not set up an Amazon or RackSpace account with my work credit card. But I am in Chicago and my database server/ file server is in Dallas TX. So I decided to just create a mirror on my laptop onto a shared drive on my server. There’s lots of ways to do this, but the path I chose was to use RoboCopy, a command line copy tool from Microsoft that is part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. I’m running XP and I wanted the mirroring of my machine to be invisible, silent, and scheduled. To do this I found I needed to take the following steps:

Install RoboCopy
Create a batch file to mirror the directory I wanted
Create a windows script to call the batch silently
Schedule the windows script to run automagically

Install RoboCopy: Download the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit and install it. Very easy.

Create a batch file to run RoboCopy: I named mine c:/backup.bat and it looks something like this:

Set Source=”C:\Documents and Settings\jdlong”

Set Dest=”\\myDallasServer\backup\jdlong”

Robocopy %Source% %Dest% /MIR /Z /R:0 >nul

This simply sets the source and destination and then runs RoboCopy with the /MIR (mirror) and /Z (restartable) switches invoked

Create a windows script: The problem with the batch file is that it is noisy when it runs. Even piping the output to nul it still produces a CMD window that stays up until it finishes running. That’s where the Windows Script file comes into play. It calls the batch file but hides the CMD window. I created a file called c:\runBackup.vbs that has this in it:

Set WshShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
WshShell.Run chr(34) & “C:\backup.bat” & Chr(34), 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

Schedule the windows script: Control Panel -> Scheduled Tasks. Then I created a new task that runs c:\runBackup.vbs every night at 11PM. The only down side is that when I change my password I have to remember to change the password associated with the scheduled task or it will fail.

The only upside is that I figured out that Iron Mountain sucks prior to having data loss. I got lucky. Next week I am going to test my backup. And then test it every quarter after that. And I won’t depend on my corporate IT do to my backups.

Cerebral Mastication » windows

Remote Backup Fail and How to Silently Copy Files