Automating WSS 3.0 Backups with a Script

Although SQL backups of the content databases for a Windows SharePoint Services farm can be used for data recovery, it’s usually a good idea to also perform backups through the stsadm.exe utility to facilitate site and object-level restores.   I recently took on a task to script a more robust solution for the automation of WSS farm backups, which I will describe here.

The stsadm.exe utility can be used to backup in two modes, site collection and catastrophic.  The site collection method backups up an individual site and content for an individual site, specified by URL, and the catastrophic backup method backs up the entire farm or a specified object in a full or differential mode.    I opted to go with the catastrophic backup method in this script to support differential backups and eliminate the requirement to enumerate individual sites for backup operations. 

WSS Backup Script Overview

The script is a bit too long to post in its entirity, but it can be downloaded here.   The script accepts three parameters:

• The target backup directory path
• The backup type (full or differential)
• The number of backups to maintain

The backup operation is relatively simple:  the script uses the WScript.Shell.exec method to execute the stsadm.exe command (after querying the registry to determine the install path of WSS).

Command = sPath & “\STSADM.exe -o backup -Directory ” & BackupDir & ” -BackupMethod ” & BackupType

Set oExec = WshShell.Exec(command) 
While Not oExec.StdOut.AtEndOfStream 
    OutPut = oExec.StdOut.ReadAll
Wend 
Do While oExec.Status = 0
    WScript.Sleep 5000
Loop

To improve monitoring of the operation, the script performs a shell execution to the eventcreate.exe utility to log status to the Windows Application Log.   (Although the WScript.Shell supports basic EventLog logging, I wanted to control the event source and ID, so the eventcreate.exe utility seemed to be a better option).

If blSuccessful then
   Command =  “Eventcreate /L Application /T INFORMATION /ID 943 /SO “”SharePoint Backups”” /D “” ” & sMesg & “”
Else
   Command =  “Eventcreate /L Application /T WARNING /ID 944 /SO “”SharePoint Backups”” /D “” ” & sMesg & “”
End if
Set oExec = WshShell.Exec(command)

The most complex operation of this WSS backup automation script is the maintenance of old backups.  The stsadm backup operation maintains an XML file named spbrtoc.xml in the backup directory with meta-data related to past backups.   While an example of deleting backups older than a certain time interval can be found here, I wanted to maintain past backups based on a count (x number of fulls, x number of differentials).    To implement this, the script loads meta-data from the Table of Contents XML file into an array, determines the number of backups to be purged (correlated to the current backup operation type – full or differential), flags the oldest backups for deletion, and then deletes the related backup directories and XML nodes.  

Automating With System Center Operations Manager 2007

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