Windows Server 2008 R2 bare metal backup – which drives?

If you are running System Centre Data Protection Manager (2010/2012) on Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 you may or may not know that when you are running a Bare Metal/System State Backup you are actually using the built in Windows Server Backup feature to keep your data safe.

One thing that baffled me is why on some servers the backups are so large right until I figured out it was backing up drives other than the C (Operating System) drive. As it turns out when you perform a bare metal backup Windows looks at not only the OS drive but any other drives that might be relevant in a disaster recovery scenario.

So how do we find out which drives are included in the backup? Simple method is to go to the command line and enter this command-

wbadmin.exe start backup -allcritical -backuptarget:C:\test

Don’t worry it won’t accualy perform the backup but it will give you a little list of which drives are included as you can see below.