jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Thu Dec 27 10:04:27 CST 2007
Gary, That is correct. You can create "shared" folders, and any shared folder can be duplicated. I bought WHS (built my own using an OEM copy) for two things. The first was to nail down once and for all the backup of my pictures. The fury of a mother hath no equal when you lose a couple of hundred pictures of her little darlings. WHS manages this quite effectively. I also want to use it to manage automated backups of every computer in the house. WHS also manages that very effectively. They have a service that installs on each computer that performs the backups in the middle of the night, and the amount of data backed up is "compressed" due to the very cool technology that they employ. You can tell it to keep daily backups for 90 days, weekly backups for 52 weeks and monthly backups for 120 months. By default it is something like dailies for 3 days, weeklies for 3 weeks and monthlies for 3 months, something like that. That makes perfect sense, allowing you to restore back to a point in time just like the Windows XP "snapshots" do. The restore works, I can attest to this because I had to change the hard disk in my laptop and it "just worked", installing on the new disk and booting right up once I fixed a technical issue of my own causing. I have also seen testaments from other users about restoring back to (some time period) just by running the restore and selecting the time. One guy clicked an email hotlink and INSTANTLY infected his system, all kinds of crap happening. He finally remembered that he had this wonderful restore, restored to the previous day and voila, no more virus. So, I WANT that capability. I am a one man show and I NEED to be able to get my servers, my dev machine or my wife's laptop back up and running if a drive dies or something unexpected happens, WITHOUT spending hours doing so. I have spent days restoring all of the software that I have installed on my systems when a crash happened. it is just incredible how much stuff we end up with, and just trying to remember what it all is can be a major undertaking. So photo backup is the selling point to the wife, backup / restore is my personal reason for WHS. Unfortunately all the backup information is lost if the main hard disk dies in WHS. For some reason that info is stored on the main drive and is NOT duplicated. Stupid really, but that is just reality at the moment. With luck they will listen to those of us pinging on them about just how stupid it is and fix it but for now if you want that capability, then RAID is the answer. Make the boot drive at least raid 1, or better yet just make a huge raid 5 / 6 volume and let WHS use that to install the system and the storage. Once you have raid, I think the "file duplication" is no longer useful and just takes up space for a data protection that is now handled by the raid itself. PC backup is so critical to me, and WHS does such a good job of the backup / restore, that I am going to do raid and reinstall WHS on it so that I can have that peace of mind. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gary Kjos Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2007 10:00 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] WHS and backups But you can still tell it to create multiple copies of selected folders on multple drives though right? Just not the backup files themselves? GK On 12/26/07, jwcolby <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> wrote: > Oh man oh man. Before anyone rushes out to implement WHS as a backup > solution you need to know that it has a glaring weakness, the backup > stuff is not duplicated, nor can you force it to duplicate. Thus > backups will be trashed (or may be) if a disk fails. I have to say I > LOVE what WHS is doing here but you need to be aware of this issue. > > My intention is to soldier on but I will be implementing a raid > solution in order to prevent disk failures from impacting the > solution. It appears that WHS has some pretty cool technologies and > it claims to allow access to daily, weekly and monthly backups back as > far as 10 years. IF you have a raid solution you win, else you lose > BIG-TIME if you have a hard disk failure. > > > Sigh. > > > > John W. Colby > Colby Consulting > www.ColbyConsulting.com > > -- > AccessD mailing list > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > -- Gary Kjos garykjos at gmail.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com