dchiavari / bkuser

bkuser script - create a system environmental variable (last logged on user) in a list of computers, to be used in Veeam backup policy definition

"bkuser" script

Author: Danilo Chiavari (www.danilochiavari.com) Date: June 9th, 2019

This script was born to facilitate backup policy creations for workstations in Veeam Backup & Replication / Veeam Agent for Windows.

The script (bkuser.vbs) does the following:

• Parses a list of computers (hostnames or IPs) from a CSV file (list.csv, newline-delimited), then for each of them:
  • Retrieves the last logged on user name from the Windows registry
  • Sets an environmental variable ("bkuser") in the system context, with the last logged on user name as value

After doing this, it is easy to leverage the bkuser environmental variable when creating a backup policy from within Veeam Backup & Replication (or standalone Veeam Agent as well).

For example: in order to back up only the 'Desktop' folders, C:\Users\%bkuser%\Desktop can be used.

In order to run the script, you need to have administrative privileges on the machine you are running the script from and on all target workstations.

USAGE: open an elevated Command Prompt (Run as Administrator) and run the script directly: C:\scripts\bkuser\bkuser.vbs

Running the script using cscript is recommended, as all "logging" (wscript.echo) output would be written to console (command prompt window) rather than pop-up boxes.

EXAMPLE: cscript C:\scripts\bkuser\bkuser.vbs

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Script execution from the backup server

Policy definition using the variable

File-level recovery from a backup

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NOTE: Of course, this is very crude and very far from perfect.

Limitations:

• Multi-user machines cannot be properly protected this way. Best approach would be just using a policy where "Personal files" (that is, "C:\Users") checkbox is ticked
• There might be corner cases where the user who last logged on is not the "main" user (e.g. a technician). In this case you should manually re-run the script or manually adjust the variable accordingly
• Error handling is more or less non-existent

Possible future improvements:

• Implement an option to parse not only machine names/IPs, but also user names from a CSV. This way you can be sure the variable will always be set to the correct user name