NTBackup

~ the eulogy ~

Windows XP was the machine I did my degree on, and NTBackup was sitting on it the entire time, buried under Accessories in the System Tools folder. I never opened it, and almost nobody did. That was the honest relationship most of us had with the only backup program Microsoft shipped for thirteen years, and it is why the thing died without anybody noticing until they went looking for a file.

NTBackup was not Microsoft code to begin with. It came out of Arcada Software and Conner, later folded into Seagate, and Microsoft licensed a cut-down version of what those companies sold as a commercial product. It arrived on 27 July 1993, the day the first Windows NT shipped, and it stayed in the box through NT 4 and Windows 2000, then through XP and Server 2003. There was a wizard for people who wanted to click and a command-line binary for administrators who wanted to schedule.

Underneath it did real work. Shadow Copy let it read files that were open, and Task Scheduler let backups run overnight without anyone sitting there. The target could be a floppy, a hard disk, a Zip cartridge or a tape. On tape it wrote Microsoft Tape Format, a real industry format that Backup Exec and others could read. On everything else it wrote BKF.

~ the dossier ~

~ the tape era ~

It is easy to forget how long tape was the answer. NTBackup was designed in a world where a server room had a drive in it and somebody swapped cartridges on a rotation, and the program's whole shape follows from that. Full backups and incrementals, a catalog to find things in, a verify pass at the end. When the target moved from tape to a second hard disk, the program did not change much. It kept producing one large BKF and it kept being slow.

The reputation problem was never really about features. It was that a free tool bundled in the box is the tool nobody chooses, so everyone who cared about backups bought something else and everyone who did not care ran nothing. NTBackup got the remainder.

~ what Vista swapped in ~

Windows Vista reached general availability on 30 January 2007 and NTBackup was not in it. Backup and Restore took the desktop side while Windows Server Backup took the servers, with WBAdmin standing in for the old command line. The new system had a better idea about images, storing backups as Virtual Hard Disk files that you could mount and browse. It also dropped tape support entirely, which for a certain kind of administrator was the end of an era announced in a release note.

The part that mattered to ordinary people was smaller and worse. Backup and Restore could not read BKF. Every archive anyone had made in the previous thirteen years was suddenly a file with no program.

~ the restore-only download ~

Microsoft's answer was the Windows NT Backup Restore Utility, a stripped download that could open a BKF and pull files out of it and do nothing else. They shipped it for Vista and Server 2008, then again for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. It is still linked from download archives today because people still turn up old drives with BKF files on them.

Shipping a restore-only tool is an admission, and it came after the decision rather than before it. A backup program's real contract is with the tapes and disks somebody put in a drawer years earlier and has now gone looking for.

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