When I decommissioned my Windows Home Server recently, I decided to replace it with Windows 7. However, I had over 20 scheduled tasks running on the WHS box to do things like back up my websites and backup files on the server and such.
I wanted to recreate these scheduled tasks on the new Windows 7 install, but discovered that Microsoft had changed the format for scheduled tasks in Win7 and provided no mechanism for importing the old .job files from Windows XP / Windows 2003. Windows 7 now uses XML files for import and exporting task definitions – but no conversion tool from the old .job format.
I really didn’t want to be spending the time manually recreating all of these tasks, but a bit of Google research found a possible solution involving remote invocation of the schtasks command line tool. Here’s what I did.
The first issue was that I had already decommissioned the WHS install, although I did save the C & D partitions on the system drive so I could have theoretically booted it up again. However, I had already changed some of the machine’s hardware (new MoBo, new SATA controller, etc), so that was always going to be a last resort and fraught with potential boot-up issues.
Fortunately I still had an old laptop running Windows XP, so I was able to copy the .job files I had backed up from the WHS box over to the XP machine and have them recognised by Task Scheduler there.
Next, I ran the following command on my Windows 7 laptop from an “elevated” command prompt (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> right mouse click on “Command Prompt” and select “Run as administrator”):
schtasks /Query /S remote_computer_name /U remote_username /P remote_password /XML > output_file.xml
… where the “remote_computer_name” was the name of my Windows XP machine, and “remote_username” and “remote_password” were for a valid administration user on that machine.
This command tells the remote machine to dump a list of all parameters for all scheduled tasks and send it to my console and the /XML flag tells the Windows 7 box to convert that information to the new XML format, and then I piped the output to a new file, “output_file.xml”.
The output was a concatenated list of all XML task data (which itself is not a valid file to import into Windows 7 task scheduler), so I used a text editor to copy and paste the individual tasks that I wanted to recreate and then used the “import” feature in Windows 7 task scheduler to import the new task. I believe there is a flag you can set to have the combined output XML for all the tasks be valid to import directly, but I didn’t try that, preferring to manually select which of the tasks to import and doing them one at a time so I could then check the settings each time.
There are a plethora of new features and settings in Windows 7 task scheduler, so it does pay to verify and tweak any settings after importing them. I really am quite impressed with the new functionality in Windows 7 task scheduler!
The Expert suggestions are too much trouble so I’m switching from Windows task scheduler to something different altogether so as to not run into this problem again the next time Microsoft pulls this stunt.
Have you created a username with administration privileges on the Windows XP box where the tasks are?
Yes, I use “root”, which shows as Computer administrator, password protected in User Accounts. Thinking that maybe that user account was somehow reserved and/or corrupted, I created user “skeduler”, which also shows as Computer administrator, password protected in User Accounts.
Unfortunately, this does not work for me. I have tried connecting to another computer from task scheduler and get “you do not have permission to access this computer” and command line schtasks /query /s gets “ERROR: Access is denied.” However, from another XP Pro system, the command line does return the task table, but of course, there is no /XML switch! At this point, I will just recreate the tasks manually, but it would be nice to know what the trick is to make this work. The problem machine is running Win 7 Pro.