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Backing up the WHS box RRS feed

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    Wow - this whole issue of not having available a painless and foolproof way of backing up/restoring your WHS storage pool for off-site storage just blows me away.

    Everything else in WHS is so geared towards the distracted/disinterested home user, so why not something like this?  I'd like to see MS (or a third-party like Paragon) develop and market a foolproof program/plugin to quiesce the system and then create a compressed image of all of the hard drives in the storage pool onto a USB or eSata drive(s).  I'm not talking necessarily about complicated incremental or differential backups here - just something that will allow you to backup everything confidently and take it off-site.  It should be able to restore a system's image completely at the click of a few buttons.  

    How hard can this be?

    I use Paragon Drive Backup on my XP boxes and it painlessly creates a compressed image of any drive I choose.  I've used it to completely restore a drive with no muss or fuss several times.

    It seems to me that this is more of an economic issue than a technical one.  If WHS gained a larger market share I'm sure some product would be developed.
    Wednesday, May 20, 2009 5:20 PM

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    The only thing that it will back up is the shares.

    You can back up the home server backup database manually. It's unsupported, but pretty easy, and is documented in the Home Computer Backup and Restore technical brief. A community member even encapulated that fuctionality in an add-in; search in the developers forum for "BDBB" for more information.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Wednesday, May 20, 2009 7:47 PM
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    Ed, it's a question of practicality; imaging the entire system really requires booting some other operating system for the imaging task. But if all you want is to back up your shares and take that off site, there's a tool built into Windows Home Server that lets you do that. To learn more, read the topic Home Server Backup in the console help file. 

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:59 PM
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    Hi Ken,

    Thanks.

    Will this tool back up the backups of the machines that WHS backs up?  LOL - Say that 10 times - I know that sounds funny but you know what I mean.

    In other words, if my house burns down or is broken into and all of my computers are stolen, I would certainly want all of the data stored on those machines and backed up onto WHS to be on my offsite copy created by this tool.

    Thanks

    Wednesday, May 20, 2009 7:16 PM
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    The only thing that it will back up is the shares.

    You can back up the home server backup database manually. It's unsupported, but pretty easy, and is documented in the Home Computer Backup and Restore technical brief. A community member even encapulated that fuctionality in an add-in; search in the developers forum for "BDBB" for more information.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Wednesday, May 20, 2009 7:47 PM
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    Thanks for the info.  Multi-step backups including using an unsupported add-in... I'm liking your idea above more and more about a booting another O/S to accomplish a simple image backup.  I will explore this and test it out when I build my WHS for my testbench.

    I'm exploring this box to deploy to small business clients as a comprehensive backup solution but so far... it's got a big, gaping hole.

    I appreciate your insights here.... you have saved me hours of research time.

    Wednesday, May 20, 2009 7:56 PM