How to backup the WHS Server
All,
Given the quality of the answers on this group, I would be very interested in approaches to backup (and recover) the entire WHS server.
Understand the ability to take a disk image using existing tools which I presume will backup the o/s - any experiences with this?
Understand the ability to backup shares to a local disk
Particularly interested in making DVD backups of the backup data itself.
Why? - When I build a machine I take a full backup and then add incrementals to it as the system changes (kids adding software etc) and would like to find a way to preserve this in the case of WHS failure.
Not sure wether storage volumes can be exported and imported into another WHS install?
Given the amount of data that will be stored on these servers moving forward and a strong backup/recovery solution is required to prevent major issues in the event of hardware failure?
Thanks
Dave
All Replies
Armesd wrote: All,
Given the quality of the answers on this group, I would be very interested in approaches to backup (and recover) the entire WHS server.
Understand the ability to take a disk image using existing tools which I presume will backup the o/s - any experiences with this?
Understand the ability to backup shares to a local disk
Particularly interested in making DVD backups of the backup data itself.
Why? - When I build a machine I take a full backup and then add incrementals to it as the system changes (kids adding software etc) and would like to find a way to preserve this in the case of WHS failure.
Not sure wether storage volumes can be exported and imported into another WHS install?
Given the amount of data that will be stored on these servers moving forward and a strong backup/recovery solution is required to prevent major issues in the event of hardware failure?
Thanks
DaveNot sure this is really feasible Dave.
Backing up the SYS partition is probably fairly easy, but why would you want to? Much easier to just reinstall from the DVD, and then recreate your users quickly. Though I guess it wouldn't be THAT much more work to ghost an image onto DVD (should all fit on one DVD) for archiving purposes.
Backing up the DATA partition is an entirely different animal though. Here we're probably talking multiple terabytes in total data. If all you care about is data protection, WHS has the Duplicate feature which gives exactly that to protect against a drive failure. If the Server/SYS volume were to crash, but the drives themselves didn't, you can still access the data on the storage drives, as they're standard NTFS volumes.
- Dave, the best way I can think of to fully back up WHS itself is with a disk imaging tool. You would have to do something like this:
- shut down WHS.
- Boot into the disk imaging tool.
- image all drives (at the same time).
WHS provides security for the data stored on it through share duplication. Backups of client PCs are secured through the client PC itself (if WHS fails and backups aren't recoverable, you still have the client PC). If the WHS system disk fails, all you lose is your users and (maybe) backups, assuming you have a second drive in the storage pool. Considering the volume of data the average home is likely to put on WHS, I don't see any backup solution being practical. I have a relatively small WHS setup, and it would take many DVD-Rs and several days to back up the entire server that way. And tape drives of the class required to back up a server cost many times more than a WHS device itself will likely cost (not to mention that backup tools may cause a variety of problems with WHS when restore time comes). Using an external drive for backup sounds good, until you realize that you could add that drive to the storage pool, turn on share duplication across the board, and get some actual use out of that drive while still "backing up" the data on the server. Ken,
I really think there should come some system to backup WHS; Imagine your house burns to ground, your WHS and all your valuable bakcups probably won't survive such an event. So when disaster strikes I would really value an offsite backup of my precious data
This doesn't necessarily have to be a WHS full system backup. I think it should be possible to store the backup data and shares in such a on external disk / tape in such a way the you can at least recover individual files / or folders from this backup, it's unlikely anyway that you will be able to get systems identical to the ones lost, so image will be probably be useless in most disaster situations. Now that I think of it, such scenario is already possible with current WHS, although it's probably a bit laborious and time-consuming, and you will lose most of the compression.
1. hook up an external drive to any WS connected to WHS
2. open WHS console
3. select last backup for 1st WS
4. restore to the external drive
5. repeat for other WS
6. copy content of shares to external drive
7. move external drive to save location or backup online.
The only thing is that you probably would not be able to restore directly from WHS console to a tape drive, unless you have some tool to mount it locally with a drive letter. It would be very convenient if you could backup the WS backup's and shares on the WHS to an external HD, Tape drive or online backup. In the Netherlands you currently already get online backup for one PC for less then 5€/month, no data limit!! Perhaps online backup could be one of the future services provided to WHS users! I would certainly be interested to help setting this up.
You don't need expensive tape solution for backup: You can get DDS3 drives for free or almost for free. (20 - 50$) DDS3 tapes are also very cheap, 2 - 3 $ each. So for something like 1000Gb you would have to pay no more then 200 - 250$. If you do first backup on vanilla system and then use differential or incremental backups this only costs limited amount of space and time. I currently do this for all my WS, however I would rather do it only on my WHS.
Obviously with my suggested solutions you would lose the abilty to use the very easy WS recovery from WHS, however at least your precious data (which for many people in Western societies I am sure will be an essential part of their life) will be recoverable!!
brubber wrote: Ken,
I really think there should come some system to backup WHS; Imagine your house burns to ground, your WHS and all your valuable bakcups probably won't survive such an event. So when disaster strikes I would really value an offsite backup of my precious data
This doesn't necessarily have to be a WHS full system backup. I think it should be possible to store the backup data and shares in such a on external disk / tape in such a way the you can at least recover individual files / or folders from this backup, it's unlikely anyway that you will be able to get systems identical to the ones lost, so image will be probably be useless in most disaster situations. Now that I think of it, such scenario is already possible with current WHS, although it's probably a bit laborious and time-consuming, and you will lose most of the compression.
1. hook up an external drive to any WS connected to WHS
2. open WHS console
3. select last backup for 1st WS
4. restore to the external drive
5. repeat for other WS
6. copy content of shares to external drive
7. move external drive to save location or backup online.
The only thing is that you probably would not be able to restore directly from WHS console to a tape drive, unless you have some tool to mount it locally with a drive letter. It would be very convenient if you could backup the WS backup's and shares on the WHS to an external HD, Tape drive or online backup. In the Netherlands you currently already get online backup for one PC for less then 5€/month, no data limit!! Perhaps online backup could be one of the future services provided to WHS users! I would certainly be interested to help setting this up.
You don't need expensive tape solution for backup: You can get DDS3 drives for free or almost for free. (20 - 50$) DDS3 tapes are also very cheap, 2 - 3 $ each. So for something like 1000Gb you would have to pay no more then 200 - 250$. If you do first backup on vanilla system and then use differential or incremental backups this only costs limited amount of space and time. I currently do this for all my WS, however I would rather do it only on my WHS.
Obviously with my suggested solutions you would lose the abilty to use the very easy WS recovery from WHS, however at least your precious data (which for many people in Western societies I am sure will be an essential part of their life) will be recoverable!!
While this sounds good... it won't work for 99% of the people. The people that WHS is marketed towards are the folks that aren't doing any backup at all right now, and want ease of use. Those people aren't going to go through the work of running nightly backups on an external media, and storing off site. History has shown us this over and over and over for the last 30 years. Furthermore, you couldn't backup the drives directly from WHS, because of the DEmigrator service... Tape just takes too long! By the time you got 20% of the way through a storage pool of any size, the data would already have been overwritten. And to buy a system that's fast enough, you'd be spending way over $20k. So, now you're forced into a file by file backup system... only THAT'S WHAT WHS IS! And you still won't get the users to run the backups, or to take the media off site, so it serves no purpose.
What I could see working though, is an ADD-IN to WHS, that monitors certain folders/shares, and copies the data found there, over the internet, to an online storage system. This kind of automated solution might work for the intended audience... until that folder/share that's being backed up grew too large to easily copy in the window allowed.
- There's an interesting article on manual offline backups on Philip Churchill's WHS blog.
- brubber, while a cheap DDS-3 tape drive and media sounds like it would be a good solution, it suffers from exactly the same problems as backing up to DVD-R: it's too slow (if I remember correctly DDS-3 drives generally could stream to the tape at about 7 GB/hr true throughput), and the media is too small (12/24 GB, right?) to be a practical option.
Consider a WHS with a terabyte of online storage. It's maybe 60% full (600 GB) and maybe 60% of that (360 GB) is non-backup data. So, 360 GB will take around 50 hours (!!!) to back up, and (assuming 2 to 1 compression) around 15 tapes.
And the hardware and media you're proposing are "reconditioned", right? Are you seriously recommending that people go out and buy end-of-life hardware and media to back up WHS? Ken Warren wrote: brubber, while a cheap DDS-3 tape drive and media sounds like it would be a good solution, it suffers from exactly the same problems as backing up to DVD-R: it's too slow (if I remember correctly DDS-3 drives generally could stream to the tape at about 7 GB/hr true throughput), and the media is too small (12/24 GB, right?) to be a practical option.
Consider a WHS with a terabyte of online storage. It's maybe 60% full (600 GB) and maybe 60% of that (360 GB) is non-backup data. So, 360 GB will take around 50 hours (!!!) to back up, and (assuming 2 to 1 compression) around 15 tapes.
And the hardware and media you're proposing are "reconditioned", right? Are you seriously recommending that people go out and buy end-of-life hardware and media to back up WHS?Yes, I agree with you that if you have large amounts of data this isn't the most pratical solution. It's certainly slow, however if like I said if after finishing your first backup you only do differential or incremental backups the slow speed is not much of a problem unless you add more then 12 GB of data per day which would fit to a single tape without compression. If your shoving that much of essential data per day you should indeed be looking for pro solutions. Also speed is comparable to most online backup solutions unless you have high speed SDSL (which is also expensive) and enough bandwith available
It's seems unlikely to me that a nomal household would have more then 100GB of essential data to backup, unless they have loads of home video they want to preserve.
Hardware may be reconditioned, tapes are brand new for that price, nothing wrong with that, In practice DDS3 or for example Travan are still widely used for day to day backup of many server systems that don't store huge amounts of data. I have an external Surestore DAT24 (68pin SCSI). HP still actively supports this drive for almost any OS with regular driver updates and even ROM updates and live support. For me that's certainly not EOL!
I do agree that it's not an ideal solution, especially if you want to secure large amounts of data, however it's cheap and secure.
brubber wrote: Ken Warren wrote: brubber, while a cheap DDS-3 tape drive and media sounds like it would be a good solution, it suffers from exactly the same problems as backing up to DVD-R: it's too slow (if I remember correctly DDS-3 drives generally could stream to the tape at about 7 GB/hr true throughput), and the media is too small (12/24 GB, right?) to be a practical option.
Consider a WHS with a terabyte of online storage. It's maybe 60% full (600 GB) and maybe 60% of that (360 GB) is non-backup data. So, 360 GB will take around 50 hours (!!!) to back up, and (assuming 2 to 1 compression) around 15 tapes.
And the hardware and media you're proposing are "reconditioned", right? Are you seriously recommending that people go out and buy end-of-life hardware and media to back up WHS?Yes, I agree with you that if you have large amounts of data this isn't the most pratical solution. It's certainly slow, however if like I said if after finishing your first backup you only do differential or incremental backups the slow speed is not much of a problem unless you add more then 12 GB of data per day which would fit to a single tape without compression. If your shoving that much of essential data per day you should indeed be looking for pro solutions. Also speed is comparable to most online backup solutions unless you have high speed SDSL (which is also expensive) and enough bandwith available
It's seems unlikely to me that a nomal household would have more then 100GB of essential data to backup, unless they have loads of home video they want to preserve.
Hardware may be reconditioned, tapes are brand new for that price, nothing wrong with that, In practice DDS3 or for example Travan are still widely used for day to day backup of many server systems that don't store huge amounts of data. I have an external Surestore DAT24 (68pin SCSI). HP still actively supports this drive for almost any OS with regular driver updates and even ROM updates and live support. For me that's certainly not EOL!
I do agree that it's not an ideal solution, especially if you want to secure large amounts of data, however it's cheap and secure.
Yes, but you can't maintain incremental backups only forever. Best Practices is Full once a Month, Full once a Week, and Incremental every night. That's at a minimum. This type of solution just isn't practical for an average household!
1 - It's too slow - Unless you only backup a VERY small fraction of the data, backups will take DAYS to complete. And if you're only backing up a fraction, is it really worth a full system to do?
2 - It's too unwieldy - Users are NOT going to remember to put a new tape in each night. They won't.
Users are NOT going to take the tapes off site to store them. So the system has already failed!
Your average home user will barely figure out how to create the backup set configuration... how in the HELL are they going to figure out a restore? Let alone a restore with incrementals that spans 14 tapes?!
3 - It's too expensive - With the cost of the HP unit estimated at $400 to $500, you're looking at 1/2 that price just for the initial Tape hardware, and that's not counting media.
And if you're only talking about backing up 100gb of data, why go through this hassle at all?! Hell, you can get a USB 120gb storage drive for $150. It's 10x the speed, smaller, and can backup everything onto 1 drive, no need for incrementals.
I think if you're that concerned about data security, you look into one of the online systems that will integrate into WHS. Flat fee per month for storage, ubiquitous data retrieval from anywhere on the planet, completely automated. Set it up to monitor a couple folders, and it will do all the offsite backups for you at night. Why worry about speed if you're not using the bandwidth?
Ken / Prelector,
If you both read my first post you could see that I'm not envisaging tape backup to dds(3 or whatever) as an ideal solution. It's just a cheap but also (as I said) laborious and complex route and certainly not manageable for average home-users, with a number of limitations. Despite numerous remarks that you can not backup WHS to tape and then restore from tape I've found that you can do it if you take proper precautions (at least from a single full backup, incrementals /differentials probably wouldn't restore properly). I've done this once with the beta just to see if it could be done, found it worked, and also concluded that's it' not a sensible thing to do.
All I would like to see in WHS is a simple utility that is integrated in the console and can either backup all of the data or a selection to an external device (USB disk / Tape drive) or online backup without to much hassle for the enduser.
I really like the concept of WHS which really simplifies management of all systems in a household or even small companies! The only thing I'm missing is off-site storage of (essential) data. Probably that will only be a few GB for most housholds. I think the people that get a WHS should be made aware of the importance of off-site storage, andd should be offered an easy solution to do this.
Also if you integrate (or sell as an option) a proper backup solution with a simple disaster recovery scenario the WHS market could be extended to numerous small, medium or even large companies. There are numerous companies that are currently running W2K3, SBS, Linux or whatever type of server loaded with services they don't need and that they can't manage properly themselves.
Woody, thanks for the link to Philip Churchills blog. It's good to see that there are some (albeit not perfect) solutions.
As Philip's blog mentions, there's already 4 companies offering online backup options that are compatible with WHS. That's you're simple solution right there. Considering the product is still in beta, and most people/companies haven't seen it to develop add-ins yet, that's pretty good.
I don't see the ability to perform tertiary back-ups as a requirement for WHS. I strongly believe that this is a need that should be covered by Add-Ins, and it seems that this is already being done.
- You clearly don't understand my point. Ofcourse you can already backup WHS data in a multitude of ways. However none of the currently available methods offer an easy way for a complete backup with disaster recovery. None of the solutions on Philips blog is currently capable of doing this, and only one of them provides an WHS Add-in. IMHO the basics for such a backup solution should come from WHS team. Others can then extend this into easy to use and full featured Add-ins.
Prelector wrote: As Philip's blog mentions, there's already 4 companies offering online backup options that are compatible with WHS. That's you're simple solution right there. Considering the product is still in beta, and most people/companies haven't seen it to develop add-ins yet, that's pretty good.
I don't see the ability to perform tertiary back-ups as a requirement for WHS. I strongly believe that this is a need that should be covered by Add-Ins, and it seems that this is already being done.
brubber wrote: Prelector wrote: As Philip's blog mentions, there's already 4 companies offering online backup options that are compatible with WHS. That's you're simple solution right there. Considering the product is still in beta, and most people/companies haven't seen it to develop add-ins yet, that's pretty good.
I don't see the ability to perform tertiary back-ups as a requirement for WHS. I strongly believe that this is a need that should be covered by Add-Ins, and it seems that this is already being done.
You clearly don't understand my point. Ofcourse you can already backup WHS data in a multitude of ways. However none of the currently available methods offer an easy way for a complete backup with disaster recovery. None of the solutions on Philips blog is currently capable of doing this, and only one of them provides an WHS Add-in. IMHO the basics for such a backup solution should come from WHS team. Others can then extend this into easy to use and full featured Add-ins.
And I don't think you understand the intention of this first release of WHS. This product is intended as a simple backup solution for your basic home family user. This user base would typically NOT bother with offsite backups (though I do believe an internet based solution for important files would be successful). WHS IS the backup solution for these users. Backing up the backup is a level of sophistication, and complexity, that isn't required for this target market! Not to mention, that backing up 1+TB of data isn't feasible with the technologies available to these people. As Ken and I have explained, these consumer level tape solutions take too long to backup a datastore of this size. The data structure would change before the backup completed, rendering the backup useless.
What you keep referring to is a total disaster recovery situation. This type of situation isn't the point of WHS, nor would it typically be required to be "easy". WHY Backup the SYS volume? You can recreate in less time with a reinstall. It isn't realistic to backup the entire DATA volume of all data in a 1TB+ environment. If you need to backup a portion, then do it via an online system. If the entire 1TB+ is mission critical data that requires off-site backups, then WHS probably isn't the right solution for you anyways. You're really looking at a small business backup solution.
I understand that certain people will want/require this level of redundancy, but the entire target market won't. This makes it fully within the Add-In focus for support.
I guess I just don't understand what you require for additional backup protection... You can't cost justify the hardware to do a full system image on tape, in the time window you would have for the backup to complete. Since you're talking about a full environment failure (house fire), who cares how simple the restore is? I think the user will have a few more important things on their minds. As long as the data is safe, and can be gotten to in some manner, that should be fine enough I would think.
brubber wrote: Prelector wrote: As Philip's blog mentions, there's already 4 companies offering online backup options that are compatible with WHS. That's you're simple solution right there. Considering the product is still in beta, and most people/companies haven't seen it to develop add-ins yet, that's pretty good.
I don't see the ability to perform tertiary back-ups as a requirement for WHS. I strongly believe that this is a need that should be covered by Add-Ins, and it seems that this is already being done.
You clearly don't understand my point. Ofcourse you can already backup WHS data in a multitude of ways. However none of the currently available methods offer an easy way for a complete backup with disaster recovery. None of the solutions on Philips blog is currently capable of doing this, and only one of them provides an WHS Add-in. IMHO the basics for such a backup solution should come from WHS team. Others can then extend this into easy to use and full featured Add-ins.
I would tend to agree with Ken/Prelector on this one.
The solution that you've described with the DDS3 drive/tapes is not, in my opinion, any easier or more practical for disaster recovery. Tape is iffy at best - to be sure your tapes are viable as a backup, you need to do sample restores of the data periodically - where are you going to do that restore?
I believe the online backup solutions are the best option - because of the difference between how they work and how tape works, they are much more viable for doing just the occasional (1x per month) full backup and then incrementals/differentials for regular backups... restore does not include the need to apply additional tapes in the correct sequence.
The fact is, there is not a practical solution to "bare metal" restore of WHS - it's not the intent of the product.
In the past I had a DLT II drive that I got to do backups of a home server - I got it so I could have off-site backups of my data easily. I ended up doing off-site backups about once a year! And I'm someone who is at least interested in doing backups and having them offsite.
Now, WHS is running on my home-lan and all of the PCs are image backed up to the WHS in such a way that I don't have to touch them for weeks, and I still can walk up, insert a CD and do a bare-metal restore of a PC that has died.
In addition, my shared files are backed up in two ways: folder duplication on the server, and on-line, offsite backup via the internet to a third party's server - that happens automatically. The WHS native folder duplication takes care of any local hardware failure, the off-site backup does two things - versioning of the files that change and might need to be rolled back to old versions (corruptions in Quicken files, etc) and disaster recovery in the case of fire/flood/earthquake/tsunami/meteor strike, etc.
WHS and cheap broadband and online services have finally given me a way to have cheap, easy, automatic backup that can survive just about any failure scenario that I can think of. If my house is destroyed, bare-metal restore of the data is NOT what I would look for first - the first thing is that I would want to have access to my critical files (financial software files, scanned copies of insurance policies/mortgage information/etc.) The problem with tape is I HAVE to have a PC that I can restore to in order to get access to that data - and I have to have a compatible tape drive to use for the restore. With online backup, I can use a web client, browse the backup set and get my critical data immediately from any windows PC that has internet access.
I have about 55GB of data backed up online from my WHS - out of nearly 1.4TB of data that is on the server. That 55GB is everything that is critical and not reproducible from my other sources - financial info, scanned PDFs of my personal files and papers, digital photos and original word and excel documents of various types from the 14 years of my marriage. Everything else is data that can be re-ripped if necessary: CDs and DVDs from my personal collection that I could pull out of the closet and re-rip. If I lost those in a fire, the other data that is backed up is sufficient documentation that I can submit the homeowners insurance claim and re-purchase them, otherwise I'm merely inconvenienced a bit by having to re-feed them into a ripping station on my home LAN.
I agree that an offsite backup solution is beyond the scope of what Microsoft is after with Home Server. That being said, I have a system in place for doing just that, using a USB hard drive that WHS doesn't seem to like and my old fileserver solution, a Linksys NSLU2. I just turn on the NSLU2 and USB drive once a week, and use SyncToy running on WHS to synchronize all the shares to the USB drive. When I'm done, I stick the USB drive back in my safe. Pretty soon I'm going to purchase a second USB drive so I can keep one of them offsite, and swap them out whenever I visit my in-laws. Then if my house ever burns down and manages to destroy the local backup in the safe, I'll only be a trip to my in-laws' house to have all of my irreplacable data back.
Of course as my data grows, this will be less feasable, as it will require two drives that are bigger than the total of all my shares (minus duplication, of course) that are completely separate from WHS. But I'll be able to rest assured that barring a widespread natural disaster, all my data will be safe.
Now if only someone would write an add-in to control SyncToy...
Prelector wrote: And I don't think you understand the intention of this first release of WHS. This product is intended as a simple backup solution for your basic home family user. This user base would typically NOT bother with offsite backups (though I do believe an internet based solution for important files would be successful). WHS IS the backup solution for these users. Backing up the backup is a level of sophistication, and complexity, that isn't required for this target market! Not to mention, that backing up 1+TB of data isn't feasible with the technologies available to these people. As Ken and I have explained, these consumer level tape solutions take too long to backup a datastore of this size. The data structure would change before the backup completed, rendering the backup useless. - Irrespective of the "intention" of WHS I think it's its no more then normal that beta testers and future users also discuss these basic issues.
- I disagree that backing up the server isn't required for this target market. If you are offering a server solution users should at least have the option to perform off-site backup. Also home users should be made aware of the importance / usefullness of storing important data on more then one location. Also if you browse this forum you find more and more threads from people have already (permanently) lost data.
Prelector wrote: What you keep referring to is a total disaster recovery situation. This type of situation isn't the point of WHS, nor would it typically be required to be "easy". WHY Backup the SYS volume? You can recreate in less time with a reinstall. It isn't realistic to backup the entire DATA volume of all data in a 1TB+ environment. If you need to backup a portion, then do it via an online system. If the entire 1TB+ is mission critical data that requires off-site backups, then WHS probably isn't the right solution for you anyways. You're really looking at a small business backup solution.
- I never said that you should backup the SYS partition as part of a disaster recovery solution. This would be part of classical enterprise server disaster recovery scenario, however this is obviously senseless for WHS. Main problem would be that this generally requires identical hardware, which in most situations will be impossible to get for average home-user.
A possible scenario I envisage would be the following:
- users installs add-in for external backup of WHS
- user selects data to include (users, shares, WS backup data, specific folders, installed programs, ....) or all data
- user selects target location (USB disk, some online backup solution, tape or whatever is available) and schedule
- backups should now run automatically, user get's notification when backup complete or if there is some problem.
DISASTER STRIKES, not necesarily a house fire, also other events such as a power surge can wreck multiple systems
- user buys new WHS and WS hardware
- WHS install DVD, options: fresh install, upgrade, restore from backup
- choose restore from backup
- system is installed, required updates are downloaded and installed
- WHS now ask for backup location, and then allows user to select what they want to restore.
- Join new WS
- From restore add-in now restore specific files / folders / app data to WS.
Yes , as already mentioned this before and I fully agree. Only point is that in the current situation it will be very difficult to make such an Add-in. WHS should provide basic knowledge / toolsPrelector wrote: I understand that certain people will want/require this level of redundancy, but the entire target market won't. This makes it fully within the Add-In focus for support. Prelector wrote: I guess I just don't understand what you require for additional backup protection... Yes I do
Yes, where is my insurance policy, where are my important addresses, what's my social security number, where are my important appointments for the next few months, where are all my E-mails, I have lost precious family pictures / video, where are my mortgage documents . If you scan all important documents and backup these things together with more dynamic data to some off-site location you will have much less problems afterwards.Prelector wrote: ISince you're talking about a full environment failure (house fire), who cares how simple the restore is? I think the user will have a few more important things on their minds. Prelector wrote: You can't cost justify the hardware to do a full system image on tape, in the time window you would have for the backup to complete. - I'm not promoting tape backup whether cheap and slow or fast, fancy and expensive. I only indicated in my first post in this topic that it's POSSIBLE to setup cheap tape backup for a limited amount of data. When volume shadow copy is used (which is mainstream in most back-up apps) time window is not really a problem
Prelector wrote: As long as the data is safe, and can be gotten to in some manner, that should be fine enough I would think. -You're right, as long as the data are safe and accessible.
- SyncToy is a wonderful tool! I never understood why it's not included in a default windows installs
Since some people feel that off-site backup's are not relevant / important for future WHS users it may be good to note that at this moment 2 topics concerning off-site backup are in the top 5 of most viewed answers on this board!!!
Please review the top 5 most viewed answers and check if the answer to your question may be one of in this list.
- Re: Web access, how?
This involves multiple steps (manual for now). 1. You need to have a domain name registered to you
- Re: Errmm.....Beta Invites?
See this announcement for an answer to your question: http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeSer
- Re: What happens if my Home Se...
jochen_S wrote: Scenario Home Server is installed on 1 HDD. A 2nd HDD is connected to the system
- Re: Another vote for interim u...
OK, I 'll bite.
We definitely need to take ownership for not communicating a more clear status
- Re: Home Server Backup
From the Release Documentation for Windows Home Server Beta 2: ''Archive your files offsite. Windo
Also on on numerous WHS blogs this topic regularly emerges. I think you can not ignore these facts.
Perhaps MS should send out a survey to all beta testers asking them specifically about their experiences and wishes.
And for those people that keep telling me off-site backups are beyond the scope of WHS please read this small piece from WHS DOCUMENTATION
"Archive your files offsite. Windows Home Server ensures that data in your shared folders is protected against failures of a single hard drive when you have multiple hard drives and folder duplication turned on. However, it is recommended that you keep another copy of the files in your shared folder on an external hard drive (USB or FireWire) and store it offsite.
Caution
Many existing backup applications, such as ntbackup.exe (included with Windows prior to the Windows Vista™ operating system), do not back up the shared folders on Windows Home Server correctly. The backup appears to be successful, but a restore may corrupt data. This is a known issue and is being investigated............ "
All I want is merely to have the option to make proper backups of my shares and WS backups.
- Re: Web access, how?
