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We are up to three Windows Home Servers on site. They happily sit unassumingly in the corner of the server room each backing up a combination of 10 computers/servers.

Benefits of WHS.

  • Daily incremental image based backups of each machine.
  • Saves disk space by consolidating duplicate bits across images.
  • Easy access to files within an image through a fool proof UI.
  • Simple image based recovery, again, through a fool proof UI.
  • Did I mention a fool proof UI? I mean the thing is dead simple to use for backup AND recovery.

Our only problem at this point is keeping a list tracking which WHS a given network computer was originally connected to. I'd love something as simple but that can handle 30+ machines at once. Is there anything out there?

joeqwerty
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GollyJer
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  • P.S. - If someone with 2000+ reputation reads this can you please suggest consolidating the three Windows Home Server tags? Thanks. – GollyJer Aug 18 '10 at 18:11
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    Ook, that's a messy set of tags. – sysadmin1138 Aug 18 '10 at 18:20
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    Why are you backing up PCs? The users should have their important data residing on a file server and then just back that up regularly. – MDMarra Aug 18 '10 at 18:46
  • Synonyms created. – Bill Weiss Aug 18 '10 at 18:49
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    @MarkM: Accepting that business data should be on a server computer there can be some utility to backing-up machines that have a complex software load and aren't able to be re-created by a simple "re-join the domain and let the software load from Group Policy" solution. The Windows SBS backup functionality is reasonably unique. I'd love to see a product offering with similiar functionality for a reasonable price. The server-side block-level deduplicated data store alone is enough to "sell" me. – Evan Anderson Aug 19 '10 at 00:36
  • @MarkM: What Evan said. :-) – GollyJer Aug 19 '10 at 03:11

1 Answers1

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I use this: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

And I think it is the coolest backup technology ever. It is linux, so you may have to deal with some issues, but I think it works well. It is file based however, I don't know about Windows Home Server, but backuppc doesn't do images.

Amala
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