Monitoring and Troubleshooting

You can change the settings for the backup at any time, of course. You can also use Properties/Bandwidth Throttling to limit the bandwidth available to the online backup. You can enter data from 256Kbps to 1Gbps and also specify dates when these values apply. You can also configure these settings in PowerShell. An example is shown in Listing  1.

$mon = [System.DayOfWeek]::Monday
$tue = [System.DayOfWeek]::Tuesday
Set-OBMachineSetting -WorkDay "Mo", "Tu" -StartWorkHour "9:00:00" \
 -EndWorkHour "18:00:00" -WorkHourBandwidth (512*1024) \
 -NonWorkHourBandwidth (2048*1024)

Keys and Proxies

In the Encryption tab, you can change the password for the encryption; Proxy Configuration lets you enter the data for the proxy server. You can see the online backup schedule in the Windows Server 2012 task management, Microsoft Online Backup section. Again, you can make changes here.

The Azure Backup management console also has a Warnings tab, where messages from the service are displayed. They can include messages about storage space or notifications when a new version of the agent becomes available. If you click on a message, you typically see a hint or a link to a website that can help you solve the current problem.

The PowerShell Get-OBJob command displays an overview of the configured backup job. The agent writes errors to logfiles, in addition to the Event Viewer. You will find them, for example, in the C:\Program Files\Windows Azure Backup Agent\Temp directory. In the Event Viewer, you will find more detailed messages under Application and Service Logs\Cloud Backup . The backup is handled by the Windows Azure Backup Agent system service. You can restart or stop the service for troubleshooting. At the command line, type either

NET START OBENGINE
NET STOP OBENGINE

to do so.

Restoring Data

You can restore data with Azure Backup just as from a local backup: Right-click Backup and choose to restore. In the wizard, select the data storage device from which you will be restoring the data and at what time. You also need to define a location for the restored data in the window.

When starting the restore, you can also choose a server from which you want to recover data (Figure 5). The wizard shows all the servers that you have registered. Instead of the graphical interface, you can use PowerShell. To do this, store the appropriate data in variables and then start the recovery (Listing 2).

Figure 5: You can restore data from Windows Azure Backup via the Windows Azure Backup management interface or use PowerShell.

$source = Get-OBRecoverableSource
$item = Get-OBRecoverableItem -Source $source[0]
$FinalItem = Get-OBRecoverableItem -ParentItem $item[0]
$recover_option = New-OBRecoveryOption
Start-OBRecovery -RecoverableItem $FinalItem -RecoveryOption $recover_option