Enjoy.

To set up your job, make sure you choose the “ZIP” option in the first step of the wizard. You can then select “Tape” as your destination.

In the meantime, I need to point out one flaw in the original blog post (which has been corrected). I mentioned that we could back up and restore System State. That feature won’t actually be in the initial release.

In fact, we’re wondering whether to include this feature at all, because:
- For disaster recovery, we are strongly recommend that everyone use the drive imaging features – especially given that the cost of an external hard drive is less than $150 each
- We don’t fully understand the impact of restore situations, especially when it comes to Active Directory, clusters, synchronization, etc.
- We see the best practices as imaging for disaster recovery, and tape for data archival backup.

For the hard-core System State fanatics, there’s actually a way of scripting a System State backup through wbadmin.exe on Server 2008:

wbadmin start systemstatebackup -backupTarget:X: -quiet

This will enable you to back up system state to a designated drive.

I’ll provide more details as they come to hand…

The tape format that we will use will be incompatible with NTBackup – because the NTBackup format doesn’t cater for encryption or compression. Well, actually the format does, but not NTBackup’s implementation of it.

Instead, we’re going to use the ZIP-64 format, popularised by WinZIP. We’ll also be publishing our format, so that any data recovery company can read the data. Also, we’ll be releasing a tool that can take the ZIP file off tape, and put it onto a HDD.

So yes, it really will be an open format, meaning that you can be confident of retrieving your data well into the future, even without BackupAssist.

Regards,

Linus

One question – how open standard will the backup be. I.e. can I read the tape with backup exec or NTBackup.

Keep up the great work
These blogs and wbadmin are the best sources of info on backup on the web

Cheers

Mike

And that’s in addition to Tape drive support.

And we’re confident that our engine will be the best ZIP based backup system available. Development is progressing smoothly, and we should have a prototype ready in about a month’s time.

Linus