Tuesday 3 March 2015

Cannot Configure Backup Schedule - SBS 2008 2011 - the filename, directory name or volume label syntax is incorrect. Adding a new backup drive to an existing backup set

Naturally, we have a lot of clients who using Windows Backup with SBS - its a great little utility that comes with reporting. In some situations we have 8 tapes running in a grandfather, father, son rotation which span many months.

Annoyingly, if you try and add a new backup drive to the job and don't have all the original disks to hand you will often get an error message such as:

Cannot Configure Backup Schedule
or
the file name, directory name or volume label syntax is incorrect. Adding a new backup drive to an existing backup set

You can get around this by plugging in all the backup drives and adding the new one - but does anyone have THAT many USB ports on a server? and what if some of the drives are offsite/failed/etc?

The alternative is to use the command line backup utility called wbadmin (windows backup admin). Follow the below steps:

1: Open up a command line with administrative privileges
2: wbadmin /? for a list of options
3: Assuming you have a job already running and you want to add another disk, firstly we have to identify the disk in question. So plug it in and then when the system is ready, type wbadmin get disks
4: A list of all the disks will appear in the system - look for the new backup drive and then right click and select "mark"
5: Click and drag to highlight the disk identifier string and then press enter (you've now copied it into the clipboard)
6: Now type: wbadmin enable backup -addtarget:{identifierhere}
{identifiedhere} should be replaced with the string you just copied (right click, paste)
7: press enter and then select Y if you are prompted to overwrite

As usual when messing with backup disks and windows backup, double and triple check its the right disk before accepting!

And that should be it - keep an eye on on the screen after you add a disk as if the system doesn't think its big enough it will alert you.



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