Windows Home Server is the best of hardware I have purchased in a long time.  What amazes me is that almost no one knows about it!

I was chatting with Rocky Lhotka and Brian Randell at the VSLive Las Vegas reception and talk turned to backups.  We all acknowledged how well Acronis TrueImage has worked in the past.  I mentioned that while I was using the Enterprise edition at work to backup the desktops of all my developers the bloom was off the rose and I was disappointed with some significant limitations in their centralized management.

I then went on to fill them in on how my personal backup strategy has evolved.  Depending on the machine I have up to three backup strategies.

1. Everything in my house is backed up to Windows Home Server. This thing is brilliant.  The backup is better than what is offering with Microsoft Data Protection Manager for corporations!  It will automatically back up every connected PC in your house to your home server.  The backups are de-duplicated so you can backup a large number of machines in a fairly small space.  The machines in my house have around 2TB of storage in total but as the image below shows I currently use about 501MB to back them all up!

When it comes time to restore the data you have two choices.  You can mount the backup image as a drive letter and restore individual files OR if the machine has cratered you can boot from a CD and restore the machine with a bare metal restore!  Two tips here

• If you have any special network or disk drivers Windows Home will put a folder at the root your backup that contains any non-standard drivers.  At restore time just mount the backup on another machine in the house.  Copy that folder to a USB key and then connect the USB key while booting from the Windows Home Server restore CD.  It will automatically load the extra drivers and go on it’s way restoring your machine!
• Sometimes this isn’t enough to get it to restore.  In my case I was using a Lenovo x200 with an external DVD to restore.  Come to find out there is a newer Windows Home Server Restore CD.  SP1 does not install it but you can go out and download it from Connect.  Read more about it here.  I have only had to use this improved CD once I suspect due to lack of an internal CD/DVD drive on my x200.

2. Now that my home server is going such a great job backing up all the machines in my house how do I backup the home server?  SP1 offers an option to back it up to an external drive however in the case of a break-in or fire I would prefer that a redundant copy of my data reside somewhere outside the home. Most of the online backup options like Mozy and Carbonite don’t have options for Windows Home Server.  Internally it is Windows Server and Carbonite doesn’t support this platform and Mozy wants you to purchase their Business product.  I looked at KeepVault which is an online backup service for Windows Home Server but it was so bloody slow I finally gave up.  My solution, JungleDisk.  They have a beta of a Windows Home Server specific backup utility that integrates into the console and allows you to select what folders to backup, how much bandwidth to use, etc.  Uses Amazon S3 on the backend which isn’t cheap, my 157GB or so runs about $30/month, but is the best solution I have found to date.

3. I travel quite a lot and for my laptop need something that is constantly backing up my data and allows me to restore a lost piece of data wherever I am.  I started out using the aforementioned Carbonite but got frustrated with it lack of options and at the time lack of Vista support.  I moved to Mozy and have been happy ever since.  Mozy is setup to automatically backup whatever folders you choose whenever the machine is idle.  When you need to restore you just go to My Computer, double click on the Mozy Home Remote Backup icon to mount the backup, navigate the folder structure and grabs the files you need.

Saturday, November 01, 2008 12:39:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]