A few common backup scenarios serve to illustrate some of the strengths and weaknesses of the new Windows Server Backup tool. Let's look at them one at a time.

Image backup. In this scenario, you're backing up an entire volume and perhaps multiple volumes, with the intention of having a backup that you can use to restore a machine that suffers a catastrophic failure affecting an entire physical disk or disk array.

In this scenario, Windows Server Backup fares well. It is a volume- and block-oriented program, based (at least when doing disk-to-disk backups) on the Volume Shadowcopy Service that has been around since Windows Server 2003, so it loves backing up a complete volume. The speed of this tool for full-volume backups is remarkable. The tool doesn't offer a verification pass option, so you have no easy way of determining if your full-volume backup is accurate, but it sure is fast! And the program can back up files that are in use.

System State backup. Frequently, server admins make system state backups before certain operations that could conceivably scar the vital organs of the operating system: system files, the Registry, the boot environment. A simple affair in the old NTBACKUP tool, a System State backup is no longer easy.

If you are selecting a full volume backup of the system volume, then Windows Server Backup will give you a checkbox calling for the inclusion of "recoverability information." That's code for the System State. (Come on Microsoft, call things by their common names and make our lives a little easier.) But there's no option in the GUI to back up the System State only. If you want to do that, you're going to have to install the command-line tools and get familiar with WBADMIN.EXE, as in the following example:

wbadmin.exe start systemstatebackup -backuptarget:d:

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