Does WHS take an image of hard drives?

[Azzin]

Or did I imagine it? :confused:

I thought it took a complete image of a drive that you could do a complete restore from in the event of a failure.

Or does it take a backup oif specific files and folders?

[rooney]

you can prety much tell it what you want it to back up.we have it running in my shop we have 3 pcs in total wich it monitors ,and takes a full back up of evertyhing o/s including. in the event of a hard drive failure on one of the monitored pcs ,you simply put a new hard drive in pop in the windows home server disc ,and the server restores the pc back excatly how it was.we took one of our hard drives out and put a brand new one in just to make sure it works and it did just that took about 1hour all back up and running .just need to make sure that the lan card you have in your pc is reckonized or have the mboard disk to hand.otherwise it cant comunicate with the sever. windows home server is a great bit of kit .:thumbsup:

[Uridium]

The really clever bit though is that if you are backing up say 3x WinXP machines on your network using the WHS it will only keep 1x copy of any files duplicated across machines (e.g. office or windows binaries) to save disk space :thumbsup:

[whitters366]

The really clever bit though is that if you are backing up say 3x WinXP machines on your network using the WHS it will only keep 1x copy of any files duplicated across machines (e.g. office or windows binaries) to save disk space :thumbsup:

Really? Can this be substantiated? (Not that I don't trust my learned colleague Uridium, you understand). I would also be interested if it lets you restore back to a certain version in time (like restoring an initial/vanilla configuration), rather than an up-to-date copy.

[SeaneyC]

Really? Can this be substantiated? (Not that I don't trust my learned colleague Uridium, you understand). I would also be interested if it lets you restore back to a certain version in time (like restoring an initial/vanilla configuration), rather than an up-to-date copy.

Yes, got 4 XP machines backed up here, all fairly vanilla installs, makes virtually no difference to the backup space with the 4 compared with when we were jsut backing up the 1.

It also keeps a number of incremental backups, and you can opt to manually backup a system state (initial setup for example) and it will keep it until you delete the "image" (not really an image, but as good as as far as i'm concerned in my situation)

[whitters366]

Thanks SeaneyC!

I do have WHS, but haven't really played with it much. It's running on a Compaq ProLiant ML117 (I think) - Core 2 Duo, with 1GB RAM (2 x 512MB).

I plan to upgrade the RAM to 4GB (I think it will support up to 16GB).

As an alternative, what do people think about maybe upgrading to 16GB, and installing, say, Fedora 9, and then creating a VMWare image of WHS and using it "virtualised"?

[SeaneyC]

WHS is based on Server 2003 SBE which is 32 bit - You'll be wasting your time upgrading to 4gb of ram as it will only be able to address around 3gb.

I have played about with the idea of installing a few virtual machines for various reasons, i like the idea of only presenting WHS with only one drive as drive extender seems to take away too much performance for my liking when handling multiple drives at the moment. I'm holding off though until the verdict is back from PP1 as to bother with the hassle of going virtual at the moment, as i think i would want to go Linux with the host system, and i'm not very familiar with it at the moment.

[Azzin]

Does anyone know where you specify WHS to take an image, because all I can see is the option to add folders? :confused:

Ta.

[Mr Incredible]

In the WHS console you configure a Backup for each defined client. This is done for each partition on the client (not physical disc). When WHS installs it installs itself to the C drive and creates a D drive for the shared folders, and the backups are created in the background and hidden on the D drive. If youadd more drives to the pool, WHS just makes it available as if it were an extension (dynamic disk I presume) to the D drive for the backups. YOu don't specify where you can place an "image".

But strictly speaking it not a disc image. It's a cluster image and checksum image. It's done at the disk I/o level which means WHS can backup files which are ostensibly "in use"; a great help when you have Outlook open and the PST file is normally "locked". Not with WHS it isn't!

[Azzin]

In the WHS console you configure a Backup for each defined client. This is done for each partition on the client (not physical disc). When WHS installs it installs itself to the C drive and creates a D drive for the shared folders, and the backups are created in the background and hidden on the D drive. If youadd more drives to the pool, WHS just makes it available as if it were an extension (dynamic disk I presume) to the D drive for the backups. YOu don't specify where you can place an "image".

But strictly speaking it not a disc image. It's a cluster image and checksum image. It's done at the disk I/o level which means WHS can backup files which are ostensibly "in use"; a great help when you have Outlook open and the PST file is normally "locked". Not with WHS it isn't!

So in the event of (for example) putting a new HDD in my laptop, does it restore in the same way as reimaging software (such as Ghost) would?

Ta.

[Mr Incredible]

Sorry, didn't get email notification.

The restore is done from booting a Restore CD which finds the WHS server from which you can restore an entire drive to a nominated partition on your PC you're trying to recreate.

[zobnsaf]

The really clever bit though is that if you are backing up say 3x WinXP machines on your network using the WHS it will only keep 1x copy of any files duplicated across machines (e.g. office or windows binaries) to save disk space :thumbsup:

Did'nt know it did that! t'is very clever!

Does it look at the file hash and just not back up duplicates?

Was thinking of getting one but things like this make me want it even more!