Increase the number of saved logs in Microsoft Backup (NTBackup.exe)

Most of my customers are small businesses that I visit on a regular basis.  For some that means once or twice a week, for other’s monthly visits are sufficient.  One of the key areas I focus on when checking a site is the backup. 

Microsoft’s backup utility, NTBackup, is a tool I use at many of my customers.  Although I wasn’t a fan when tapes were the primary backup media, now that we’ve moved to Hard Drive backups, I really like it.  It’s aware of Exchange & SQL Server, will record System State, including Active Directory and you can select as little or as much data as you want.  Best of all it’s free!  If your servers are NT, 2000 or 2003 it’s built right in.  I was disappointed to find that it is not included, nor supported, for Windows 2008 (as I’ve previously posted about).

One tiny complaint I do have with the software is the limited number of logs that are saved.  By default it’s 10.  If you are checking the backup every day, or even once a week, this is fine.  You can see what happened each day.  If you don’t check the backup logs that often or, as in my case, are not at the location, you could miss potential problems.

Fortunately there is a simple registry hack that will let you decide the number of logs the program saves.  Using Regedit, navigate to and change the following registry entry:

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Ntbackup\Log Files\Log File Count

Set the number to whatever you like just remember to switch to DECIMAL, unless you are a wiz at converting hex numbers in your head!

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