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If you configure your multi-disk Windows Home Server (WHS) as maximum storage capacity will it duplicate your network's backups across multiple disks?

Say I have 4 disks on my WHS and one of the WHS disks goes bad. Is there any chance that I will lose data or does it automatically duplicate backups across multiple disks?

Guy
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You can use the WHS BDBB Add-in to force WHS to do duplication on the actual backups and also backup the "backup tracking database". This will ensure that backups survive any single-drive failure. I've even survived a System/Data drive failure and kept all my backups.

WHS Plus's forum post on WHS BDBB

IDisposable
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If you are setting it up for "Maximum Capacity" you are basically setting it up as a software spanned raid, jbod, or windows dynamic disk, whatever WHS does under the curtains I am not sure.

In order to get any sort of "real" redundancy out of your disks, at least for backups, you would be getting at least one less disk worth of space out of it, for example, if you had 4x100gb disks, the most you would be able to USE, if there was any sort of actual redundancy involved would be 300gb. If you wanted to do this though, I highly recommend using hardware raid, most of todays motherboards have this built in.

Even if you were not using the maximum capacity layout in WHS itself, though, it would only duplicate share data, not backup data.

From a "home server" perspective though, you really shouldn't need redundancy in your backups. If you lose a backup, you take another one, if you lose the computer you backed up, you restore it. If you want more redundancy than that, you'll need to look beyond WHS.

WerkkreW
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Scott Hanselman blogged about a 'secret' registry entry to do this

  • Not sure exactly which version of WHS this applies to
  • Assume this is probably what the above referenced add in is doing
Simon
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The Windows Home Server is using a kind of Raid although they won't call it that. This is not an effective backup strategy it just provides some fault tolerance.

I use keepvault to back this data up to the internet. I wouldn't reccomend them right now as they just jacked there prices through the roof but you get the idea

Yes it can suffer a single disk failure as long as it is not the system disk - With the system disk you down you don't necessarily lose your data but the rebuild has to see everything when it comes back up

Basically your data is protected against a single drive failure but the home server OS is not

CPU_BUSY
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