Windows Server backups for smaller operations

- [Instructor] Windows Server has a couple of different ways that we can back up and restore our files. One way is we can enable volume shadow. Volume shadow is a hidden partition that keeps up to 64 versions of backups that we can then restore very quickly and easily without even going through the backup application. So I'm going to right click on my C drive. And I have to be logged in as the domain administrator, which I am. And then I'm going to go to where it says previous versions. And we see that currently there's nothing turned on here. So then we're going to go to shadow copies, highlight the C drive, and choose enable. And you can enable this for all the different partitions if you'd like. And what it's going to do is it's going to take two snapshots of the C drive, in this particular case, or any drive you enable, every day. And the first one's at seven a.m. The second one is at noon. And you can go into the settings and change that. And you can also change the amount of space that it uses as well. And here we see the default amount. So if it goes over that, that's going to delete the oldest volume shadow backup. And the way CIS admins use this is if a user says that they have lost a file, then it's pretty easy on a file and print server to go back into properties and go to that previous versions tab where there was nothing there before. Now there is. So if I go to open it, then I can go in. And now what I'm doing is I'm seeing a backup copy of all the different files on my server. So if anything needs to be restored, I can just locate it and right click. I can choose open. I can drag and drop it into the production area, whatever it is I need to do. And then that file's going to be restored. And like I said, you can have up to 64 of these different backups done, these previous versions that you can go back to. So if someone said it happened last week, you can go back to the day before it happened and then restore it that way. Now a traditional backup is also available on a Windows server, and we can do that by installing it. So I'll click on add rolls and features in server manager, and we get our wizard that comes up. I'll just go through the wizard until we see the Windows Server Backup option. And that's going to be under features. And there it is. I'll just click the box, click next, and install. You also have to have a separate hard drive that has the ability to back that data up. So if I go to this PC and I don't see that, then I'm going to need to add that drive. So I'm going to go into computer management because I did actually add one, but the drive has yet to be formatted. So while the installation is happening on Windows Server Backup, I'll make that drive available. Next, I'll go to storage and then disc management. And there's my drive. Now, currently it's offline. So all I have to do is right click to make it go online. Then I'll need to initialize it. And I'll just choose the defaults you see here. And then I need to create a new volume. And you can go through and choose any of those options if you'd like, but the default options will work in most cases. Now that drive has been added and we see it as the E drive in File Explorer. The backup feature's been installed. I'll click close, and now we should be able to open this by going to tools, Windows Server Backup. And when it opens, it should say that it's installed and ready to be configured. We also see the option to back up to Azure as well if we'd like to set that up. I'll click on local backup. And now we can set up a backup schedule. We can back up once, and we can choose to recover. I'm going to click on the schedule just to show you what it looks like. We get this wizard that shows up, and we can choose the full server or custom. And it allows us to schedule how often we want to back it up. Here we have once a day by default, and we can choose the backup time, which currently is set to nine p.m. Now, if we want it to back up more than once a day, because you have a lot of files that change fairly often, then you can add that as well. And we click next. Now we can back up to a hard disc, back up to a volume, or back up to a shared network folder. If you choose the hard disc, it's going to be dedicated for that backup. So you're not even going to be able to see it anymore in File Explorer. If you choose a volume, then you're not dedicating it. So that means you can have other data on there besides the backup. And if you choose a shared network folder, you just have to have the proper rights and accessibility to that shared folder. I'm going to cancel that, and I'm going to go to backup once where we'll see similar options but without the schedule. So I'm going to choose custom instead of full this time. So I won't be able to restore the entire thing this way, but I will be able to customize what I want to back up. So I'll click on add items, and I'm just going to back up one folder just as an example. If I click on advanced settings, we can see that we can exclude things too. So if you've backed up the entire server, but you want to exclude specific files and folders, then this is a good place to do it. Then you have volume shadow settings, and this is going to be the option for that volume shadow that we set up earlier if we want to use it. And the first option is going to be, if you are backing up applications using this particular backup product, then you'll want to check that. If you are using a third party product to do that, then you can check the bottom option. I'm just backing up a folder, so that's not important for me, but it may be for you. Now I have the option for local drives or a remote shared folder. I've got a local drive, which I just configured. So I'm going to use that. Then I have the backup destination, and I'm going to choose the E drive. Click next, and I'm going to choose backup. Now this shouldn't take too long since it's just a single folder with a single file in it, but your backup may take several hours or even longer, depending on how much data you have and how fast your server is. There's another option that we see here for configuring performance settings. So by default it's going to choose a normal backup preference. And that says the time to create the backup is proportional to the size. Now you can also choose faster backup performance as well. And that's going to do what's called an incremental backup where it just makes a copy of any files that have changed since the last full backup. And you can choose to customize as well, and choose if you're going to be doing a full backup or an incremental backup of these different things, such as the system partition, the entire C drive, or anything else that you'd like. Our backup was successful. So I'm going to choose to recover it. I'll click on recover. I'm going to go in and delete the folder that I backed up just so we can show that it did restore the folder and file inside it. And now that folder is gone. I'll click next. Next again, since it's just the one backup that we did. Files and folders, or I can di an entire volume if I'd like as well. I'll expand the server. And there's my shared data folder with the test.TXT file inside it. I'm going to say to put it in the original location, but I also have the option to change to another location if I don't want to overwrite the original one. I can choose to create copies so that you have both versions. So it's going to rename one of the folders. I can overwrite or I can say do not recover items if they already exist. And I'll click recover. And it completed within just a few seconds because it was a fairly small backup. Now I'll go back into File Explorer. And there's my shared data folder and the file inside. Windows Server Backup is the perfect backup tool for small operations where a few servers or less can be easily backed up and saved in case of emergency.