How to Run External Utilities Before, During, After Backups

You can run external utilities when a backup starts and finishes. You can use this feature to control external resources or run external notification tools.

One application of external utilities is to bring a database offline before the backup and then start it again once the backup has finished.
If you use the “Check exit code” option, BackupChain will terminate the backup and report an error if the utility returns a different exit code than expected.

You can run batch files or PowerShell commands as well by using %SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe and it’s switches to run a stored script.

Hints: Use quotes around path names. Use the > operator to send console output to a log file.

Example:

C:\app\Myapplication.exe someparameter >c:\temp\mydir.txt

The above command may produce errors but because the backup runs unattended you won’t see them. The above “>” operator routes all console output to mydir.txt so it can inspected later on if an error occurs.