Configure Email Notification for Windows Server Backup

Windows 2008, R2 and 2012 all include the Windows Server Backup feature, which is a reliable but basic backup utility.  This allows you to schedule complete server backups allowing you to restore data or the entire server as necessary.  There is however one glaring omission in WSB and that is the lack of a reporting function.  It is essential to us that we can see at a glance the status of our server backups so that any failures are addressed immediately without compromising the data protection scheme.  WSB doesn’t natively allow you to configure notification emails that advise on the success or failure of each backup.  Since this is a feature that’s very important to us, we’re going to show you how to achieve this using scheduled tasks with event triggers.

Windows Server Backup writes operational events to its own event log, situated at event Logs > Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Backup > Operational.  Successful or unsuccessful completion of the backup is logged here, so we can use these events as triggers to send a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ email to the designated backup admin.  To the task scheduler Batman!

The aim here is to trigger the notification on backup completion.   It’s more practical to set up two tasks, one triggered by failure events and one by success events.  Click on ‘Create Task’ and configure as follows:

• Name: Backup Success Email Task
• Description: Notifies backup admin of scheduled backup successful completion
• Run whether user is logged on or not
• Trigger > On event > Log=Microsoft-Windows-Backup/Operational > Source=Backup > Event ID(s)=4
• Action: Send an email [configure email settings, subject, body etc as required]

Save this task and then create another task to be triggered on backup failure.  This one has a larger event trigger, as there are multiple backup failure event codes whereas there is only one backup success event code (4).  Configure the task as follows:

• Name: Backup Failure Email Task
• Description: Notifies backup admin of scheduled backup failure
• Run whether user is logged on or not
• Trigger > On event > 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]

Since this is just a basic notification of success or failure, the email doesn’t contain details of the failure, just an exhortation to go find out what’s wrong and fix it!

NOTES:

• There is also a Powershell method for scripting windows server backups and emailing the results.  See here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/WSB-Backup-network-email-9793e315
• If you need to send through an authenticated mail server (such as Office 365 or Google Apps, for example because you want to send the notifications outside your domain, you’ll need to combine these instructiosn with our instructions for setting up an SMTP Relay here.