Get Your Life Back - Windows Home Server Image Based Backup Software

SBS, WHS and Backup Software

KWSupport — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:17:31 GMT

One of my mottos has always been: You cannot have enough backup! So, I am always investigating

re: Get Your Life Back - Windows Home Server Image Based Backup Software

wayner — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:22:51 GMT

Sounds great - now how do I backup the system drive on my WHS computer?

re: Get Your Life Back - Windows Home Server Image Based Backup Software

Kevin Beares — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:02:41 GMT

Thanks for the question Wayner. This question has been answered numerous times and in numerous locations. There a number of factors that influence how I would answer your question. If you have an OEM copy of Windows Home Server, Server Recovery is pretty easy as the OEM's like HP, Acer, etc.. had to build in a recovery option for the Windows Home Server. You lose some settings through the process after putting in a new drive, but the server reinstallation process is pretty easy.

Search on Server Backup in the forums or look at some of our Home Server MVP blogs for more information on what you can do to insulate yourself froma disaster where you lose your system drive of your Home Server.

We are always looking at better options for making your life easier in case of drive failure in your Home Server itself.

Kevin

re: Get Your Life Back - Windows Home Server Image Based Backup Software

wayner — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:55:47 GMT

But why would I lose settings. The requirement to reinstall the WHS OS is not a very good solution. The reason that I run WHS is so that I can quickly restore from a Hard Drive failure. To not be able to recover my server to its pre-crash condition is a failing.

Note that I run SageTV for WHS so I have some software installed on my WHS and it is non-trivial to get it back to where it was after reinstalling the OS.

re: Get Your Life Back - Windows Home Server Image Based Backup Software

Kevin Beares — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:50:28 GMT

It is not ideal scenario, but it is a scenario where the primary drive of your Home Server could fail. As with any OS or other piece of hardware like a NAS, or an external HD, etc..... you can have failures. No one out there really has an eligant way to recover in those scenarios either. Just remember that we have done a lot of work with our OEMs through Server Recovery and Reinstallation to make a recovery as robust as possible for our V1. You still have your shares preserved, which would have all add-ins that you downloaded as well as all of your replicated file shares. Also, if you follow the Technical Brief on Backup and Restore, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=196fe38c-df20-4e19-92ca-6bda7bec3ecb&DisplayLang=en you can also recover your backup database.

If you go up to any of our MVP blogs you will see that they have other creative solutions that they have suggested to recover from this unfortunate type of event.

One other possible way that I have heard suggested before was to use another Home Server to simply backup the system volume of your Windows Home Server. It is probably the lowest cost solution to backing up a Windows 2003 Server out there. Most other third party applications that backup Windows 2003 Server are designed for the Enterprise and are priced a lot higher. I am not saying that backing up your Windows Home Server with another Home Server is a supported solution, but it is something I have heard as another option in the community.

When you are paranoid about losing data, you always have a failover plan for backups in case one fails. My solution is to use the Technical Brief and backup my backups to an external drive and use the Server Backup feature to backup my shares once a month.

I have had a Home Server for almost 4 years and have never had a system drive fail. I use the WHS Disk Management Add-In http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php?autocom=downloads&showfile=64 to keep an eye on the health of my drives. If I see something that gives any indication that I may have a drive health issue, I take steps to get that drive replaced.

Did I mention you have your Home Server on a UPS?

I hope that this was helpful. I appreciate the feedback and we are definitely always looking into ways to make recovering from a system failure even easier. Please keep the feedback coming.

Kevin Beares

Community Lead - WSSG

Secure online photo sharing with Windows Home Server and Community Add-Ins

Windows Home Server Team Blog — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:37:07 GMT

Don’t you love to share your photos with your friends and family? Those great shots of your little kids