Jim: I agree wholeheartedly with George about being cautious with the C-Drive restore. You would probably be able to revover with a Server Recovery rather than a Factory Reset but there is some risk there. (I, too, thought you had already done this at least once.)

George: Where did bruceleeon warn about "doing damage"? I do not see that....

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

I did not take the time during my haste to get the post back out to Jim so I did not refer back to "exactly" what bruceleeon said. I guess I was thinking he mentioned damage, but since that is what I was thinking, I used the damage word instead of the word "disavantages". Sorry about the misquote, but I do think Jim could do some damage and that would be more than just disadvantageous.

After you mentioned it, I went and looked at all the other posts bruceleeon made today. I did not know he just joined today and was posting so much directing us back to his website. I guess we should just be quite for a while and let him reply when/if he wants to. I hope he has some proof to back up what he is saying. We could learn something. But I must admit, it puts me off a bit with all the posting he has done today leading back to articles he has written. Who knows, maybe he has some good proofs of what he is claiming. Frankly, I bet he will not return because he was just here for a day to pimp his website. However, I hope he does return to backup all he has said as well as his statements in this thread. I will just wait and see. I learn something new every day or, at least, hope to.
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I don't want to start what might be thought of as a flame war, but calling me a "newbie" is not exactly correct. I have been in IT for more than 15 years and have plenty of experience. Aside from that, I have been a contributing member to other sites such as WeGotServed and MediaSmartHome (although they don't remember me at MSH) for quite some time. Check their wiki ( @WGS), some of those are mine reposted with my permission.

Now, for a little backup (no pun intended ). All of the articles I write about WHS are done on a production server, my windows home server. With each article I write, I make a backup, install and do the steps necessary to produce the article (which may take days) then restore my backup after the article is written.

With that said, there are some things I agree with and disagree with. Acronis True Image Echo Server is a fine piece of software that can make a good backup of your home server c: drive... however, you should not put yourself in the position to need it. As long as you have accurate backups of your shares, the rest is arbitrary and easily recoverable by reinstallation. I recommend to people that they do not go crazy with plugins and software on there server unless it is a test server.

If you feel that i am here to simply pimp my site ask some of the other sites I frequent. Do you folks here feel as though you may not benefit from any of these articles written? More people have hit my WHS email server article than any other article on my site. My Vista articles have saved people from formats and re installations. I am simply here to help out, and learn in the process my self. I like communities, and if you took the time to look, this site is on my links page.

Good Morning bruceleeon,

In case no one else has done it, please allow me to welcome you to the forums here at MediaSmartServer.net. I believe we are a group of folks that welcomes new members and encourages them to provide useful information. I guess it was just your style of rushing in a telling us about all the things you have found out about WHS that put me (and maybe John and a few others... but I don't want to speak for them) off a bit. I see that you have done a lot of things with WHS and I think I can safely say we all are seeking knowledge concerning WHS's operations here. In John's defense (and perhaps mine with some of my comments to you ) I believe we are saying that WHS is a "bit of a different animal" from other servers, primarily IMO due to Drive Extender (DE) and the way it provides an excellent alternative to RAID systems. But with this fairly new technological innovation from MS, we are still learning what can and cannot be done to a WHS server. Frankly, I believe John makes a good point about any backup solution for the C Drive maybe not working over time because of DE or perhaps even some other idiosyncrasies of the WHS OS.

If you have consistent evidence with numerous successful restores from a True Image backup, we certainly want to know that. I, for one, would like to ask you to please tell us exactly what successes... with details over time (if available)... you have had in your testing. I say this not because I don’t want to believe you but because we are talking about such a critical operation here. Any misinformation can cause us a lot of problems and loss of a lot of time if we take you at your word and try what you are recommending only to find out later your information was not correct. Again, please don’t take my last statement the wrong way. It is not intended to insult you, merely to express caution. But would you please give us as much detail about your success with True Image restores as you can.

Finally, please don't be offended by what I say here. We want you to contribute here and we want to learn from it. We just don't want you to recommend something unless you can back it up with a lot of actual experience with the process when that process could do a great deal of damage to one's server.

Let me end by taking the high ground here. Thanks for posting and linking us to your site. I, for one, was unaware of it. I hope to learn from some of the articles you have posted there. Again, welcome to I hope you will continue to post here so we can get to know you a little better. Right or wrong, I guess it takes a little time for folks here to get to know someone new. Posting as often as you can here will allow us to see your ideas and then decide, individually, to accept them. Please keep the ideas flowing here... and, please, provide as much proof for your ideas as you have time to do. I look forward to benefiting from your future posts.


George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

George and John--

Understand the risk on actually restoring that C drive data so I'll back off on that. Thanks for the heads-up.

Jim

_________________
EX475 2GB memory
Stock Processor
1 2TB HP Personal Media Drive via USB
1 2.0TB Barracuda® XT 7200 rpm drive
2 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda® XT SATA 7200 rpm drives
1 0.5TB stock drive shipped with MSS
Running HP 3.0 updated software

The thing to remember with backup and restore is that it is disaster recovery. In the event that your disk fails or a virus runs rampant on your network, that is when you do a restore. WHS is a different beast to some extent, but not by much. The issues you will face with doing a restore is mostly from your tombstone files. These are files that point WHS to your data (for health, location in the pool, duplication, etc.). if you restore your disk you run the risk of this information being old. Accurate back up of your shares is crucial. Instead of doing a clean install, sometimes, i restore my partition without the share drives connected. Dealing with the errors of drives missing is far simpler (on a home built server) than doing a complete reinstall, loading all the drivers, all the updates, the added software. Then i manually rebuild my pool. If something goes wrong, I restore my backup shares.

Care to elaborate on this process?

_________________
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? If so, be sure to Rate them at WeGotServed.

I don't know if this is timely, or simply off topic, but I posted the report on using flexraid with WHS to show a method being used to restore shares. Evidently, that technology can backup the tombstones to an extent, but with qualifications. Might be worth a read to see how this is accomplished.

Ben Ogilvie

Thanks for the notice, Ben. I found Ben's post on this forum. Here is the link to both his post and the referenced article.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4730&p=40547&hilit=flexraid#p40547

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

OK, time to bring the preceding discussion about those updated files to a close.

-- The files are updated when the backup services is stopped and then restarted.
-- As long as the files are in sync with the actual backups everything works fine. Specifically they are fine as long as no new client backup takes place AFTER the files are created.
-- I probably should have researched it further before posting but I was (maybe overly-) concerned that any potential problem be flagged early-on.

Net-net: Ignore this discussion -- it's not a problem!

And thanks to George, Alex and others who chimed in on the discussion!

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

Thanks, John. "Thank Posted" you for that.

I have decided to go to a weekly (Sunday) schedule for my "backup database" batch file. I may go back to XCOPY but for now will stay with RoboCopy since I run this only once a week now. My decision to go weekly instead of daily has nothing to do with the file updating discussion. I just decided I was not gaining as much as I, at first, had in my head I was gaining by doing the daily backups.
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

After a few weeks of research and investigation I decided to buy the HP EX495 when it became available. It has and I did. I'll get it in a few days. I do have a question about this backup script (I use a very similar robocopy script on my existing file server): Can it be used to backup Time Machine files to an external disk? I've looked around and I can't find an answer. (To be precise, I don't mean copying the individual files in the Time Machine image, I mean the whole thing, like the backup databases.)

Thanks.

Is this still imminent?

Thanks!

Okay, I just got my EX495 and set up a Time Machine backup. It looks like it's just a giant file in the \Mac share (which you have to create by hand, thanks HP). It should be pretty easy to back that up as long as the Mac it's backing up is not logged in and using it.

I'd add "/NDL" into the ROBOCOPY command line. It stops ROBOCOPY from logging directories in which no files were updated. This can make the logs a whole lot smaller.