Microsoft Online Backup Service is a new feature in Windows Server 8 that aims to provide a low cost choice to deliver business backup benefits to Windows Server customers.  With no upfront infrastructure costs (other than an adequate internet connection), customers can now get ‘peace of mind’ that their business is protected against disasters.

Before we make this pre-release service available to everyone, we want to ask a small group of you to test it out and let us know what you think. Testing will be open to those people who live and will use the pre-release service in the United States.

Steps to getting started:

Online Backup Agent Installation

1. Install Windows Server Backup on Windows Server 8 by going to Server Manager -> Add Roles and Features -> Features.
2. Download and install Microsoft Online Backup Beta Agent.

Usage

1. After the installation you will see “Microsoft Online Backup Service” icon on the desktop. You can use this link to launch the standalone console. You can also use Windows Server Backup console (wbadmin.msc) which will allow you to access local and cloud backups from a single console.
2. In order to register your Windows Server 8 for online backup service, you need to change the temporary password for the Microsoft Online Service ID (provided over email). Please note that if you have already changed the temporary password once, you can skip this step.
   1. Go to the password change page https://portal.microsoftonline.com/ChangePassword.aspx
   2. Enter your user name and corresponding temporary password.
   3. Follow the instructions on the password change page to create a new password
3. You will require registering the machine to the cloud service with your Microsoft Online Service ID credentials using Register Server action.
4. After registration, you can schedule the backup to the cloud using Schedule Backup action. Note: We are imposing a hard-limit of 10 GB storage for beta testing so make sure you select folders which don’t have huge amounts of data.
5. Once the schedule is set you can manually trigger the backup using Backup Now action.
6. Once the backup is done you can recover from older backups using Recover Data action.
7. You can also use extensive set of Powershell cmdlets for Online Backup. Start the ”Microsoft Online Backup Service Shell”. Note: You will require to run this in admin mode by right-clicking and selecting “Run as Admin”.
   1. For getting information about the Cloud Backup cmdlets use “get-help *-OB*”.
   2. For detailed information you can run get-help on the specific cmdlet.
   3. Online backup commandlets are designed based on Windows Server Backup commandlets so usage will be similar.

Provide feedback
Receiving feedback from our beta customers helps us to provide the features you value in our software. Please help us to improve Microsoft Online Backup Service by completing our beta customer feedback survey.

Support forum
If you have any additional comments or questions about the Microsoft Online Backup Service, go to the Windows Server “8” Beta discussion forum and post your questions. Someone from our community will help you get your answers.

More details

For more details, you can refer the Microsoft Online Backup Technet help at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831419.aspx