I'm looking for an applicable method to create a secondary backup of the contents of my home PCs, WHS being the primary backup. As I see it, there are two options to this: To backup the WHS, or to create another backup system from the start. I'd prefer the first one, but I'm afraid I need to proceed the latter way. I'd like to be proven wrong.

In my case there's not much content in WHS shared folders or user folders. It's about backing up the client pc backup database. WHS itself doesn't offer any means to create this backup, but BDBB add-in seems to hit this need.

BDBB tells the db size to be 5,4 TB. The size is correct, but in the same time it sounds impractically high. It would take ages to create the backup, and I would need a NAS box to offer BDBB a network resource of that size. Of course the need for disk space is mandatory regardless of the way the backup is created, but if I understand it correctly, BDBB needs to have the space as a single volume, not as several smaller resources (ie. say 3-4 2TB drives as individual network resources). I'm not sure if WHS could even handle a resource of that size, being a 32 bit system?

I wonder if I'm missing some of BDBB's capability? If not, I guess my best option is to backup every pc individually with Acronis or some similar backup software to local external hdd or to NAS device.

I'd highly appreciate any comment on this!

Ivideur

You can verify the number BDBB is reporting by looking at the Storage tab of the Server Console to see how much space is consumed by PC Backups, but I expect BDBB to be correct.

5.4 TB is the largest backup database I'm aware of, I think we need to know more about your client setups to properly advise you. Also, have you changed the default backup retention policy from 3/3/3 to something longer?

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

Yes, I think BDBB reports the correct value.


Yes, I set my policy to be 3/3/6. Being able to return six months backwards is not critical to me, but more like nice to have. My feeling was it shouldn't make things too hard for WHS, as 99% of my data stays still during that period, thus not requiring so much extra storage space after all.

The data comes from a couple of PCs mostly. One of them has around 3 TB of content, including mostly photos, self shot videos, perhaps 200-300 GB of virtual pc image files and misc stuff. A few of the virtual pc images get updated often as I use those virtual pc's, so backing them up probably causes some space requirements for WHS. On the other hand I find WHS backups of them especially valuable to me. The other client is a mediacenter pc, which has around 1 TB of movies and stuff. I know it's really overkill to make WHS to retain backups of movie files using 3/3/6 policy, but there's two reasons for that. First, the mediacenter is not really used very actively to store new movies or tv shows. If it were used on daily basis, I probably would not use WHS to make backups of recordings. Second, WHS doesn't provide an option to set the policy per client pc individually. I've just installed BDBB and I think it offers this kind of adjustments, so this will get changed shortly, I think.

The BDBB clients tab is for the notification schedule, not the backup schedule.

I think your setup is not very conducive to WHS or any client PC backup mechanism, to be honest. Ideally you'd be storing the large content on the server, so it's duplicated for redundancy and accessible by any client. I'd also advocate NOT backing up the Virtual PC image files themselves, and instead back up each Virtual PC as a WHS client.

I'm not sure how you'd accomplish this with Acronis or the like either, how do you plan to snapshot a 3TB PC and take it offsite?

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

You are correct. I found this out briefly afterwards.


Your straight opinion is very welcome! I've considered the configuration myself, and you have many good points here. I'm afraid this goes away from the Add-Ins topic, but I list a few thoughts about my reasoning:

• Server (as a new piece of hardware in my home network) would be expensive, at least if I/O speed to its disks would be anything close to local HDDs in my client.
• By having data on a server I would lose versioning (=backups offered by WHS).
• RAID (if you mean that by data duplication?) can be implemented in the client just as well.
• Having data on a server is not required to be able to share it. Shared folders and Windows 7 libraries are doing the job here.
• I don't know why exactly it is a poor idea to back up Virtual PC images as files, but I suspect that even if I just login to the Virtual PC environment for a second and logoff without really doing anything, WHS will be busy backing up the whole 20 GB image file the night after that. I'm not sure if it's that pathetic in practice, but I've kept on backing them up anyway, because a) I have faced a need to restore an old copy of a virtual machine a few times and I've never had any problem with that, b) I've got too many Virtual PC images for WHS to handle them all (in addition to the physical machines) with its limit of 10 clients, and c) because it's so easy

The way I see my current configuration is that I actually *have* a server already. It's this pc where I store just about all my valuable data. It is just that I work on my server, and not have a separate client pc for that. So it goes to the fact that WHS is not meant to backup servers with massive amount of data


Good question. My initial idea is to let WHS take care of the system drive backup, and the daily used data like mailboxes etc, just as it as been doing this far. To backup the four 1 TB data drives I think I'll just do the backup for any particular drive after I've inserted "enough" new images/videos to that drive. For those backups I plan to get a 2 TB hdd for every 1 TB internal hdd, attach the backup hdd in an eSata dock and start Acronis incremental backup -(or perhaps a file sync utility) to backup just that single drive. With incremental backups I'd have versions, with sync sw I'd need two or more backup hdd's for every internal hdd to have versions.

As a conclusion, where WHS is lacking (in my kind of usage scenario) is that it doesn't offer a way to backup the backup database of several terabytes in any practical way. Another thing is that it's quite slow in backing up a 4 TB client pc, even when there hasn't been much changes after the previous backup. I've yet to see, if the other backup methods would help with the latter.

Your configuration obviously suits you well, I personally don't see WHS being a great fit for you, other than backing up the OS partitions on your two clients for quick restore in the event of a failure. The WHS Client Backup software is incremental and single instancing, and calculating differences in 4TB of data and communicating that back and forth to the server likely takes a fair amount of time though I'd guess it's significantly less than a full snapshot of the same amount of data.

If it were me and I wanted to use WHS, I'd have WHS back up the OS partitions of my client PCs, and then I'd use rsync or similar to keep the files contained on the large data drives synced to a local Linux server with a large RAID array for backup storage.

As to what I perceived to be your original question, BDBB itself should have no issues backing up your entire Backup DB, assuming you provide it with a backup target (network or direct attached) with sufficient space to store the backup. It will take a very long time to move that much data, and a "smarter" utility that can diff the individual 4GB backup files would quite possibly be more efficient. The latter solution would require you to create a custom script/macro to do what you want.

Good luck and let us know what solution you end up implementing!

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?