Backing up WHS | The Coffeehouse

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

I recently bought a large USB drive to serve as the offsite-backup drive for my WHS. I'm planning to use it to make a backup of my WHS once a month or something so that if my house explodes, I'll only lose a month of work or so.

I added the drive via the WHS console and selected the "backup files on your home server" option or whatever it was called. It then came up with a dialog allowing me to select the fileshares I wanted to backup to the USB drive. I couldn't find any information about wether or not it also backed up the backup database, which was kind of the whole point. Anyone know if it does, in fact, backup the backups? If not, why not? Isn't that kind of the point of backing up the WHS?

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

No it doesn't, and no it wasn't. The argument is that you have a backup of sorts of the backups, you have the machines the backups were made from.

Everyone seems to think that's a silly argument, but there you have it

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to blowdart

#Oct 10th @ 11:20 AM

Yeah, but all those machines are in my home, so if my home gets washed away in a flood, won't everything?

Ugh. Anyway, bring on WHS 2010 with better offsite backup support. Dahat?

dahat

Backing up the backup database is not something we support I’m afraid... however based on documented information how it can be manually backed up, one enthusiast went out and wrote an add-in to do just that.

Re: the future... you are not the first to ask for this feature... and likely will not the last. More than that I cannot say just yet.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to dahat

#Oct 10th @ 4:38 PM

Based on your last paragraph I'll be very dissapointed if it's not in WHS2 or whatever you guys will call it. Tongue Out We'll see.

Thanks for the link to the addin. It seems dodgy (Edit: no it doesn't, I'll go see an optometrist), but it's better than no offsite backup at all.

yakuza

In reply to Bas

#Oct 10th @ 5:02 PM

Care to elaborate on "dodgy"? I've had thousands of downloads with very few bug reports. If there's a genuine concern about my Add-In I'd love to hear it so I can make it better in a future release. Smiley I'll try to watch this thread, but feedback is preferred in the Add-In thread at my site if you're willing. Thanks for for the link, dahat.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to yakuza

#Oct 11th @ 2:11 PM

Actually, I thought dahat said "undocumented information", hence the "dodgy" label. Of course, having downloaded the add-in and now re-read dahat's post, it turns out that actually is documented by Microsoft. So, sorry about that.

It's running a backup of my backups (argh) right now at home, I'll reserve judgement until later. Smiley

giovanni
...

In reply to dahat

#Oct 10th @ 4:38 PM

dahat, can I add myself to the list of people asking for this feature? Thanks for the link, it might be a good solution for now.

Currently we use the WHS to backup our small business data. It works really well, but since the backup is local, there is a danger that if the whole office gets on fire, you loose the data together with the backup (I looked into creating VPN and leaving the WHS at home, but current solutions seem too slow). For this reason, we have to back up most machines once a week on a separate hard drive which I store at home (pain in the neck).

yakuza

In reply to Bas

#Oct 12th @ 12:16 AM

@Bas: I agree an undocumented solution would be less desireable, thanks for taking another look. I welcome any feedback you have (as well as a better name for BDBB)!. Big Smile

@giovanni: Are you backing up the client backups, or the shared folders? Have you considered any of the online backup tools such as S3? How would you ideally want to do your backups offsite? I have some ideas for an Add-In around this and would love to hear the different use models people expect.

giovanni
...

In reply to yakuza

#Oct 12th @ 9:26 AM

Ideally I would like to backup everything that is on the homeserver: client backups, shared folder (alredy in place), and OS (in case the drive with the OS partition goes down the drain).

I have not tested online backup services, but given the amount of data we have, I don't think it would be worth time wise. Likewise, I think that an off site solution for the home server would be very slow (though it could be an interesting solution to keep my family backed up remotely). Bringing in an external hard drive like Bas suggested would be the easiest solution.

yakuza

In reply to giovanni

#Oct 12th @ 10:30 AM

So with the Shared Folder backup feature in PP1, and BDBB for the client backups, you're covered for backing up to an external hard drive though both require manual interaction. There is no known way to reliably back up and restore the OS, unfortunately, however the Server Recovery process is relatively easy and only takes a couple hours to reinstall, download all updates, and reconfigure your users and add-ins.

fknight

In reply to yakuza

#Oct 12th @ 9:26 AM

What I would love for someone to come out with is a service that runs on Windows Server 2003/2008/Whatever that allows multiple remote Windows Home Server machines (and possibly regular Vista/7 client machines) to connect to it over the Internet and backup their data (I wonder if Remote Differential Compression could be utilized as well to save on bandwidth after the initial full backup).

This way, one could set up their own cloud-based backup service based on Windows Server and sell backup service to people who use Windows Home Server through a companion add-on. There are several online backup services like S3, Mozi, Carbonite, etc., but as far as I know, the software to run these services isn't available to download or purchase, so anyone wanting to set up an offsite backup service has to write it up from scratch. If I want to set up my own cloud based backup service for people, there's nothing I can purchase to set it up Sad

dahat

Bas, unfortunately I am required to be vague given we’ve not announced anything regarding future versions... that and I didn’t know the full answer until I asked someone today (lets just say that the WHS team is not as small as it once was).

Giovanni, I will say that we’ve got work on multiple fronts going on to assist people/organizations in your position.

fknight, couldn’t agree more. In fact I’m frankly rather surprised that no one has created an Azure based backup system for ones own Home Server... or a rudimentary P2P system between a group of friends.

Backing up the contents of the shares would be easy... backing up the backup database without wasting huge amounts of bandwidth or being really smart about how you determine what has changed would be much harder I’m afraid.

Ray7

In reply to yakuza

#Oct 12th @ 10:45 AM

I don't think backup the OS is an urgent requirement (if it gets trashed then I'd rather just install it all from fresh anyway since I probably when the corruption actually occurred).

Remote offsite backups of all the client OSs and public folders is a must, as well as backing up to a USB drive (they have 1TB drives you can carry around in a laptop bag now). Automatic would be great, but I really don't mind kicking off a manual backup once a week.

Ray7

If you can zip the whole backup, then you could also store it on Evernote, but I think they'd quickly put a stop to that.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to Ray7

#Oct 12th @ 10:53 PM

I grabbed a 1TB drive recently for that reason exactly. I'm planning to just backup the entire thing on it once a month or so, and then dropping the drive off at my parents. Sure, it's manual, so you're prone to forget, but it's better than nothing and not as expensive as some online backup service that allows you to store more than half a terabyte.

I don't know if yakuza's plugin sets the server backup status to 'not backed up' after a while... a red tray icon would at least remind me of my need for an offsite backup once a month.

yakuza

In reply to Bas

#Oct 13th @ 12:33 AM

The Health Notification reminder is a very interesting idea, I'll consider that for a future release. Thanks!