As I write this I am watching WHS restore one of our laptops from backup. We have a Microsoft Small Business Server network here and a small number of laptops and desktops. Over the years we have tried various solutions to backing up the user devices — from local scripts to Data Protection Manager. Nothing has worked really well and all required manual effort to keep protection current.
But not Windows Home Server — this installs a client on the user machine and wakes it up overnight to do a backup. And incredibly it just copies the changed pages from disk, not another copy of the whole machine. Even more unbelievably it recognizes that there are a lot of common OS and application files in any collection of machines and stores one copy — with a list of who all had them. So the amount of space required to save the backups is very much smaller than the sum of the disk space for all the machines.
We run WHS on an old workstation with some internal and external disks. There are some nice commercial packages from HP, Acer and others that provide a pre-configured installation. That would be ideal for a small business — just need to ensure that there is enough internal storage. WHS has its own workgroup and will not join the domain. I am sure that Microsoft had a good reason for doing this, but it does seem a bit lame. So all of our user devices are members of the domain and the workgroup. This does have the occasional strange side effect, mostly with network shares, but in general we just ignore it.
It is a pity that it wont join the SBS server — we back that up nightly with a script that does Exchange and all our SQLserver databases. This works good enough. We had tried DPM but were dissappointed at how neurotic it was, always claiming there was some problem deep in the bowels someplace. Never anything we could do anything about — reminded me of an old girlfriend who was always trying to attract attention by complaining endlessly about imaginary ills. In the end, both the old girlfriend and DPM are distant memories — a pity, but good riddance.
So far we have done the ultimate test of a backup system — twice. We replaced the hard drive on two of our laptops and recovered them from WHS. The laptop with a CD drive was pretty painless. One just booted from the recovery CD after the hard disk-ectomy. The CD booted a small verison of windows into memory, let me reformat the new drive, then run a full restore. The old files came back just as they were pulled, fragmented like anything. So a full defrag and we are done. Really painless and only took a few hours to transfer everything across the ethernet (100mb/sec).
Well, it passes my test for good technology — just does its job and doesn’t complain unnecessarily. There is damn little of this kind of stuff around. Good job, Microsoft.
