I’ve struggled with backing up my Exchange 2010 SP1 environment in my home lab since I upgraded over a month ago.  Before I had upgraded, I was using a script that did Volume Shadow Services (VSS) backups.

After upgrading, I wanted to cut my teeth with Windows Server Backup (WBS).  Windows Server Backup is the replacement for the NTBackup program that was included with Windows until Vista, and it uses VSS to take snapshot backups of entire volumes or file systems.

Unlike NTBackup, WBS will not run backup jobs to tape.  You will need to dedicate an entire volume or use a network folder to store your backups.  If you use the GUI, you can only retain one backup set, and a new backup will overwrite the old.

This was an issue for me.  Even though I have Exchange configured to retain deleted items for 14 days and deleted mailboxes for 30 days, I like to keep multiple backups.  It allows me to play with multiple recovery scenarios that I might face in the real world.

And that is where PowerShell comes in.  Server 2008R2 allows users to create a temporary backup policy and pass that policy to the Windows Backup Service.  This will also allow you to change the folder where the backup is saved each time, and you can easily add or remove volumes, LUNs, and databases without having to reconfigure your backup job each time.

I started by working from the script that Michael Smith that I linked to above.  To modify this script to work with WBS, I first had to modify it to work with Exchange 2010.  One of the major differences between Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 is that storage groups have been removed in the latter.  Logging and other storage group functions have been rolled into the database, making them self-contained.

The original script used the Get-StorageGroup PowerShell command to get the location of each storage group’s log files.  Since this command is no longer present, I had to add sections of this function to the function that retrieved the location of the database files.

After adding some error handling by using Try/Catch, the section that locates mailbox databases looks like:

Try
{
foreach ($mdb in $colMB)
{
if ($mdb.Recovery)
{
write-host ("Skipping RECOVERY MDB " + $mdb.Name)
continue
}
write-host ($mdb.Name + "`t " + $mdb.Guid)
write-host ("`t" + $mdb.EdbFilePath)
write-host " "

$pathPattern.($mdb.EdbFilePath) = $i

$vol = $mdb.EdbFilePath.ToString().SubString(0, 2)
$volumes.set_item($vol,$i)

#This Section gets the log file information for the backup
$prefix  = $mdb.LogFilePrefix
$logpath = $mdb.LogFolderPath.ToString()

## E00*.log
$pathpattern.(join-path $logpath ($prefix + "*.log")) = $i

$vol = $logpath.SubString(0, 2)
$volumes.set_item($vol,$i)

$i += 1
}
}
Catch
{
Write-Host "There are no Mailbox Databases on this server."
}

I also removed all of the functions related to building and calling the Disk Shadow and RoboCopy commands.  Since we will be using WBS, there is no need to manually trigger a VSS backup.

Once we know where our mailbox and public folder databases and their log files are located, we can start to build our temporary backup job.  The first thing we need to do is create a new backup job called $bpol by using the New-WBPolicy cmdlet.

##Create New Backup Policy for Windows Server Backup
$BPol = New-WBPolicy

Once we have created our backup policy, we add the drives that we want to backup.  We can tell Windows Server Backup which drives we want to back up by using the drives and folder paths that we retrieved from Exchange using the code above.  We use the Get-WBVolume cmdlet to get the disk or volume information and the Add-WBVolume command to add it to the backup job.

##Define volumes to be backed up based on Exchange filepath information
##Retrieved in function GetStores

ForEach($bvol in $volumes.keys)
{
$WBVol = Get-WBVolume –volumepath $bvol
Add-WBVolume –policy $BPol –volume $WBVol
}

The Add-WBVolume doesn’t overwrite previous values, so I can easily add multiple drives to my backup job.

Now that my backup locations have been added, I need to tell WBS that this will be a VSS Full Backup instead of a VSS Copy Backup.  I want to run a full backup because this will commit information in the log files to the database and truncate old logs.  The command to set the backup job to a full backup is:

Set-WBVssBackupOptions -policy $BPol –VssFullBackup

Finally, I need to set my backup target.  This script is designed to back up to a network share.  Since I want to retain multiple backups, it will also create a new folder to store the backup at runtime.  I created a function called AddWBTarget to handle this part of the job.

Function AddWBTarget
{
##Create New Folder for back in $backuplocation using date format
$folder = get-date -uFormat "%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M"
md "$backupLocation\$folder"
$netFolder = "$backupLocation\$folder"

$netTarget = New-WBBackupTarget -NetworkPath "$netfolder"
Add-WBBackupTarget -policy $BPol -Target $netTarget
}

The backup location needs to be a UNC path to a network folder, and you set this when you run the script with the –backuplocation parameter.  The function will also create a new folder and then add this location to the backup job using the Add-WBBackupTarget.

The documentation for the Add-WBBackupTarget states that you need to provide user credentials to backup to a network location.  This does not appear to be the case, and WBS appears to use the credentials of the user running the script to access the backup location.

WBS now has all of the information that it needs to perform a backup, so I will pass the temporary backup job to WBS using the Start-WBBackup with the –policy parameter.

You can run the script manually by running EX2k10WBS.ps1 from your Exchange 2010 server.  You will need to declare your backup location by using the –backuplocation parameter.  Since this script will be performing a backup, you will need to run PowerShell with elevated permissions.

You can also set this script to run as a scheduled task.

You can download the entire script here.