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Benefit to WHS duplication of shared folders? RRS feed

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    I am new to Windows Home Server, but now that I found it, I am quickly falling in love with it. Simply outstanding technology. However, I'm wondering about the shared folder duplication feature.

    Is there a real benefit of the duplication option? I would think it'd be better to have an actual backup on an external drive than duplicate files on the same drives? I guess I'm thinking drive failure here.

    If one drive failed on my 4 drive WHS (4x1TB), would I be able to recover the duplicate files from the other three drives? Is this how it works? These drives effectively create one large spanned dynamic volume, correct? So I couldn't just drop one drive in a Vista (or XP) machine and pull data of it or could I? How would this work?

    Any other benefits? I guess I'm just trying to eliminate unneccesary used hard drive space.

    Thanks.
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:15 PM

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    Share duplication is only available if you have two or more physical drives in the server. It duplicates files on both drives. This is intended to protect against data loss due to single drive failure.

    A backup of your shares, kept off-site, witll protect against disasters such as theft, flood and fire.

    For more information about share duplication, and Drive Extender in general, see the Drive Extender technical brief.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    • Marked as answer by MarkBx Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:42 PM
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:18 PM
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    The benefit is that in case of single drive failure the data in suplicated shares are protected (A bit like RAID mirroring). In addition WHS has an option to copy data from one ore more shares to an external hard drive. In case of a real emergency you can always mount a disk in another machine to get access to the data. It's all stored in a hidden folder named "DE" in the root of the drive (or in the root of the D partition for the system disk)

    More info on WHS storage in the Technical brief Drive Extender. A lot more interesting info on WHS on this page.
    • Marked as answer by MarkBx Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:42 PM
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:24 PM
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    Share duplication is only available if you have two or more physical drives in the server. It duplicates files on both drives. This is intended to protect against data loss due to single drive failure.

    A backup of your shares, kept off-site, witll protect against disasters such as theft, flood and fire.

    For more information about share duplication, and Drive Extender in general, see the Drive Extender technical brief.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    • Marked as answer by MarkBx Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:42 PM
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:18 PM
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    The benefit is that in case of single drive failure the data in suplicated shares are protected (A bit like RAID mirroring). In addition WHS has an option to copy data from one ore more shares to an external hard drive. In case of a real emergency you can always mount a disk in another machine to get access to the data. It's all stored in a hidden folder named "DE" in the root of the drive (or in the root of the D partition for the system disk)

    More info on WHS storage in the Technical brief Drive Extender. A lot more interesting info on WHS on this page.
    • Marked as answer by MarkBx Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:42 PM
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:24 PM
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    Thanks guys. It sounds all complicated, good thing WHS does this for me! So in summary WHS can recover from a failed hard drive as long as the data was in a shared folder with duplication, or in a pinch, install the drive in a different machine and pull data off there. Sounds like a good thing then. I guess I will have to invest in an external hard drive as well for peace of mind.

    Can I only plug an external drive in for backups periodically? I would think so, so that I can store it somewhere else for safe keeping and do a monthly backup.
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:45 PM