There is a suggestion given in the Technical Brief cited below, in the section titled "Saving a Copy of the Backup Database", which involves stopping services, copying the contents of D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4} to an external hard drive, and then starting the services that were stopped.
My adaptation of this solution is to stop the services, run an ACTIVE@DISKIMAGE (www.ntfs.com) task which is a "Disk to Image" task (not a "Create Raw Image" task) specifying SYS (C:) and DATA (D:) as the two sources, and an externally-attached USB HDD (not part of the WHS storage pool) as the target for the image archive files, and once completed, start the services that were stopped.
Stopping and starting the services is done via the Windows Scheduler. Starting the ACTIVE@DISKIMAGE task is via its own built-in scheduler function.
My reasoning: If in fact the Disk to Image tasks correctly capture the stuff on SYS (C:) and DATA (D:), and if there was to be a WHS HDD failure, be it C: and/or one of the HDD's which constitute DATA (D:), then replacing the failing drive/s and doing an IMAGE TO DISK of both SYS (C:) and DATA (D:), would in theory(?) get me back to the point of the last ACTIVE@DISKIMAGE archive point-in-time.
FYI, the WHS for which this solution has been deployed (archive creation only, so far) does not have any activity with its SHARED folders or the user account folders. That's a feature of WHS that could be cut out and thrown away as far as my WHS usage scenario is concerned.
I'm aware of the following post; however, I don't know enough to know if the solution outlined above has the shortcomings enumerated in Ken Warren's post or not.
ANYBODY CARE TO VENTRURE AN OPINION AS TO THE VIABILITY OF THE SOLUTION OUTLINED ABOVE?
Ken Warren MVP, Moderator Thursday, September 06, 2007 12:33 PM
Windows Home Server Software >> Acronis Home Backup
For a backup solution to work on WHS, it needs to be able to back up two things that are not standard files. First, it needs to be able to back up the mount points under C:\FS. This is where your storage drives are attached to the file system. Second, it needs to be able to drill through the tombstones on the D: drive to get to the files behind them. Most backup solutions can't do either.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Technical Brief
Home Computer Backup and Restore
Microsoft® Corporation
Published: August 2008
Version: 1.1
As stated, in part, on page 25:
Open a Command Prompt, Click Start, Run and type CMD
Type net stop PDL.
Type net stop WHSBackup to stop the Windows Home Server Backup service.
Copy the contents of D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4} to the external hard drive E:.
Type net start WHSBackup to restart the Windows Home Server Backup service.
Type net start PDL.
First, you're not the first person to think they can do it that way (search the forums and you'll find all sorts of various thoughts along that line). However, due to way WHS handles files and reparse points, the backup of your primary drive would be worthless once you added/modified/deleted any file in your shares and/or backup database. The only way (in theory) it would work is if you did a complete image after each and every modification of all of the various files stored on your server, and that's simply not practical.
If you want to try it anyway, feel free to do so. However, I would suggest you do it on a temporary install because I doubt you'll be happy with the results once run through the entire process (backup
and restore).
