Windows Server Backup is a reliable, but basic backup utility. It has the capacity to provide you with both file-level restoration, as well as entire bare-metal recovery. Whilst being a simple and effective backup method, particularly in conjunction with other third-party backup software, Windows Server Backup has on obvious shortfall; lack of reporting. Particularly, no notification feature to notify you of a backups success/failure.
As a professional ICT services provider it is vital that we have an automated, at-a-glance ability to monitor server backups for our customers to ensure data integrity isn’t compromised and the backup strategy is in full-effect at all times; and this rings true to even the most fundamental of IT administrators, even end-users.
Windows Server Backup unfortunately doesn’t natively include an email notification feature that advises on the success/failure of a backup, but since this is a very important feature when it comes to implementing an effective backup strategy, we’ve devised a way in which we can make this a possibility through the use of Scheduled Tasks with Event Triggers.
As with most applications, Windows Server Backup writes certain events its own event logs. The logs we’re interested in taking a look at in this scenario are situated at:
Event Logs > Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Backup > Operational.
Successful or unsuccessful completion of the backup is logged here. This enables us to use these events as triggers to send a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ email to a designated email address, set of email addresses, or email distribution group.
And with that being said, let’s get to configuring things.
Configuring Email Notification for Windows Server Backup in 2008 R2 using Scheduled Tasks
The goal here here is to trigger an email notification upon completion of a backup within Windows Server Backup. It’s more practical to set up two tasks, one triggered by failure events and one by success events as this provides more flexibility. Click on ‘Create Task’ and configure as follows:
To send an email notification for Backup failures:
- Name: Send Backup Failure Email
- Description: Sends an email notifying of a scheduled backup failure
- Run whether user is logged on or not
- Trigger > On an event > Settings > Custom > New Event Filter > Log=Microsoft-Windows-Backup/Operational > Source=Backup > Event ID(s)= 5,8,9,17,22,49,50,52,100,517,518,521,527,528,544,545,546,561,564,612
- Action: Send an email (configure email settings, subject, body etc as required)
To send an email notification for Backup success:
- Name: Send Backup Success Email
- Description: Sends an email notifying of a scheduled backup success
- Run whether user is logged on or not
- Trigger > On an event > Log=Microsoft-Windows-Backup/Operational > Source=Backup > Event ID(s)=4
- Action: Send an email (configure email settings, subject, body etc as required)
Note: For a list of all the backup operation event ID’s click here.
Quick tip for monitoring multiple backups
As a professional ICT services provider, we monitor multiple servers for multiple clients, so closely monitoring the success of every backup, on every server, for every client, is somewhat impractical.
Whilst we still most definitely setup notifications for success events, we ensure we differentiate their notification locations from the failure events. Failure notification should be few and far between, so by separating their notification location it enables enables us to pay closer attention to the failure events that do arise due to the simple fact you will only receive notification when attention is required.
Coming Soon – For reasons unbeknownst to the world, sending emails via Scheduled Tasks has been deprecated in Windows Server 2012+. Achieving the same types of notifications is still definitely possible, however now it’s done via command-line utilities. We will be putting together details on how to configure email notifications for Windows Server Backup on Windows Server 2012+ very soon. In the meantime check out the following scripts: