A while ago I blogged about backing up my virtual home lab for free with Veeam Backup & Replication 10. The server on which I installed this is a Windows Server 2016 server that is also used for backing up my home PCs and laptops. And on this server I use Windows Server Backup to create a backup of the server itself.

The only thing that was missing was proper reporting from Windows Server Backup. Veeam sends nice HTML email reports and I wanted to replicate this in Windows Server Backup.

First, I created a scheduled backup in Windows Server Backup. Then I created a scheduled task that was triggered by an Event from Windows Event Viewer.

This event with ID 14 is an informational event “The backup operation has completed.” The action on this scheduled task is Start a Program. And the program to be started is “C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe” with argument “C:\Users\Administrator\Send-Email.ps1”.

The script that I use gathers details about the backup job and reads the related events from the Event Viewer. It then uses this information to construct an HTML email and sends it to my mailbox.

The resulting email looks very similar to the email that is sent by Veeam.

BTW I am not backing up the same data twice… The Windows Server Backup only backs up the System State and the system disk (for machine recovery purposes). The Veeam job backs up the MP3 files and home videos that are on the same machine.

BTW2 I also create a copy of the Veeam backup files to a cloud service here in the Netherlands. So with this, I implemented the 3-2-1 rule.