Habitat Backup Windows Tool

Detailed descriptions and imagery explaining each tool available inside Habitat. Feel free to post feature requests under each tools forum post if you would like to see something added or changed in the tools.
Post Reply
User avatar
Cubert
Posts: 2430
Joined: Tue Dec 29, 2015 7:57 pm
8
Contact:

Habitat Backup Windows Tool

Post by Cubert »

Habitat Backup Windows Tool allows you to manage Windows Backups on any Windows 10+ OS across all of your clients. It is simple to use and outputs command results in real time to the user allowing you to see the results immediately.

This tool available as of build 1.0.0.65

The Backup Windows Tool is located under the client console as a tab.


BackupWindowsTool-Manager.PNG
BackupWindowsTool-Manager.PNG (57.95 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

Management Window

This window displays all your Windows 10+ agents and what status the Windows backups are in. You can select any agent in this view, right click that agent to open a menu that will allow you to manage Windows backups.

ManagerView.png
ManagerView.png (32.21 KiB) Viewed 4315 times

BackupWindowsTool-Manager-menu.PNG
BackupWindowsTool-Manager-menu.PNG (9.45 KiB) Viewed 3961 times

Manager Menu


This menu allows you to manage the Windows Backups configuration and to create manual backups on any agent in the managers view. Agents required to be Windows 10 or new OS versions to appear in the manager view.
  • Open Console - Opens the agents Automate console window
  • Backup Now - Starts a manual backup
  • Schedule Backup - Configures a daily backups of drives or file locations
  • Get Backup Status - Gets the backup status of the agent
  • Enable and Disable Scans - Tells Automate to monitor and import backup data from that agent or to skip that agent when importing backup data.
  • Available restore Points - Shows all restore points in the current catalog on agent
  • Last Windows Backup Log - Shows the last Windows Backup log from agent.
  • Refresh Backup Data - Reschedules the standard automated scan of agent for backup related data.

BackupWindowsTool-Shadow.PNG
BackupWindowsTool-Shadow.PNG (42.33 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

Shadow Storage

During backup scans performed by Automate the Shadow Storage is recorded and imported into Automate. Right click any drive in view to resize the amount of Shadow Storage allocated.



BackupWindowsTool-Metric.PNG
BackupWindowsTool-Metric.PNG (63.8 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

Metrics

Metrics are a set of gauges and bar graphs that represent the health and status of the backups across the client.



BackupWindowsTool-History.PNG
BackupWindowsTool-History.PNG (54.39 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

History

History is a 30 day view in to the success and failure of the backups across the client for all enabled agents.



BackupWindowsTool-Events.PNG
BackupWindowsTool-Events.PNG (56.1 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

Events

As part of the automated scans we collect all log entries from the windows event log where event source comes from "Microsoft-Windows-Backup" or "VSS".



BackupWindowsTool-Scanner.PNG
BackupWindowsTool-Scanner.PNG (47.47 KiB) Viewed 3961 times

Scanning

Allows you to perform manually what the automation scanner does via automation but limited to just this client. It has a terminal mode that displays the results of each command being run so you can see in real time what is going on. There are also some automation configuration settings here you can set to tune how often the automation runs. There is a drop down menu that will set how many hours between scans or you can override this setting and set your own hour to run the scans on. If you select override scan interval and select a hour from the drop down window then the automation will only run during that hour.

The Push backups if late or missing checkbox tells the automated services to test agents current backup to see how stale it is. Windows Backup Service is a minimum of once a day backup service and can not be setup to do backups less than 24 hours apart. If backups become 36 hours old or older this function will attempt to use the configured backup schedule data to run a manual backup at the time of automation cycle. This means depending on scan cycle settings the agent may go 48 hours without a manual backup attempt(cycle = 24). This should keep backups rolling if at all possible in an event something with scheduling is failing.




How it works

The Windows Backup Tool is a manager for the WBadmin.exe command line tool native to all Windows 10 + systems. The plugin send down the different commands available in this tool and returns the response. For you to get the most out of this tool a good understanding of the WBAdmin tool and the common issues you may find. The plugin supports all the same targets and sources the command line tool accepts to setup and perform backups.

The tool can be used to back up operating systems, drive volumes, files, folders and applications. The wbadmin utility saves the image backup in a "WindowsImageBackup" folder on the target drive. To perform all the backup tasks, an agent must have the appropriate permissions, such as being a member of the backup operators or administrator group.


BackupWindowsNow.PNG
BackupWindowsNow.PNG (30.25 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

Backup Now

This tool allows you o execute a manual backup and to see the results of the backup. The return data for this tool is limited to the CW Automate command time out. If this limit is hit an "OK" is returned and the terminal quits monitoring for output from the command. This is not part of the plugin but part of Automate and we are not able to override this limit. The limit is 15 minutes.



ScheduleWindowsBackup.PNG
ScheduleWindowsBackup.PNG (29.21 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

Schedule Backup

This tool allow you to schedule a daily backup. The output of the request is returned in real time allowing you to troubleshoot common issues.


Target

Specifies the storage location for this backup. Requires a hard disk drive letter (f:), a volume GUID-based path in the format of \\?\Volume{GUID}, or a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path to a remote shared folder (\\<servername>\<sharename>\). By default, the backup will be saved at: \\<servername>\<sharename>\WindowsImageBackup\<ComputerBackedUp>\.

Include

Specifies the comma-delimited list of items to include in the backup. You can include multiple files, folders, or volumes. Volume paths can be specified using volume drive letters, volume mount points, or GUID-based volume names. If you use a GUID-based volume name, it should be terminated with a backslash (\). You can use the wildcard character (*) in the file name when specifying a path to a file




BackupWindowsStop-Delete.PNG
BackupWindowsStop-Delete.PNG (24.4 KiB) Viewed 4313 times

Stop or Disable Backups

There is 3 buttons that allow you to execute direct commands to the WBAdmin tool and the results of each command will be returned in the terminal.
  • Stop Backup - will halt any currently running backup on agent
  • Disable Backup - will stop the daily scheduled backup from running
  • Delete Catalog - will remove the backup catalog kept by WBAdmin tool.



Troubleshooting Scheduled Backup

Here are several errors we received during the building of the plugin that might be of help if you are seeing similar responses from WBadmin.


BackupWindowsDriveTypeNotSupported.PNG
BackupWindowsDriveTypeNotSupported.PNG (29.33 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

Bad or unsupported disk

We received invalid drive when trying to use a 100GB ScanDisk Thumb Drive as a target for a backup. Please consider drive issues when working with VSS and WBAdmin.



BackupWindowsFailedSchedule.PNG
BackupWindowsFailedSchedule.PNG (28.99 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

Windows Event Log with an Exception code: 0xc0000005 in the description.

We have received this one a lot. Wbadmin starts but fails to complete the configuration. It is also followed by a log event . There are many forums on this code but only a few options. The one most passed around was to delete the backup catalog and reattempt. We did not have any luck in our limited environment to see how often that worked but we did add to this schedule tool the ability to send a delete catalog request down to the agent. We will start a new post thread to keep this one in active discussion as we find ways to correct this exception code.

If you configure a scheduled backup and it fails to complete the setup process as seen in above image the "Push backup if late or missing" setting may still work and force a manual backup based on your scheduled setting in plugin. Although this may not be ideal it will force a manual backup about every 36 hours on that agent that will most likely succeed.




BackupWindowsGetStatusDuringBackup.PNG
BackupWindowsGetStatusDuringBackup.PNG (10.65 KiB) Viewed 4354 times


Get Status during an active backup running.

If you use the tool to get the current backup status and the agent is in the middle of a backup you will see the above response. It will open the session and wait for a end response. If one comes the entire response from the point that you started request until to completion of the response.



Automation Service Manager.PNG
Automation Service Manager.PNG (46.19 KiB) Viewed 4354 times


Automated Services

You can turn on and off the automation for all clients, stopping the backup scan services using the Automated Services tool.

User avatar
Cubert
Posts: 2430
Joined: Tue Dec 29, 2015 7:57 pm
8
Contact:

Re: Habitat Backup Windows Tool

Post by Cubert »

Here is an example of the Push Backup if late or missing in action.

Here is the scenario in question.

Client has 5 agents setup for backups but only 2 are working correctly on their schedules. The 3 agents that are not have failed to schedule correctly and has produced an error like described in main article. As image shows only 2 backups were reporting back daily and 3 were not. We turned on the Habitat Push Backup If Late or Missing control and now we are seeing all agents reporting restore points as they get picked up by the new function.


Capture.PNG
Capture.PNG (30.14 KiB) Viewed 3908 times

You will notice that the wave is pretty substantial across the 5 agent boundary and this is due to the 36 hour delays before forcing backup, time taken for backups to complete and the cycle time for the scanners. This will cause the wave to have some hills and valleys as it determines agents backup statuses but you will go from no recovery points to a fairly regular set of points.

Post Reply

Return to “Habitat Documentation Forum”