My Windows Home Server got sick, and I lost all the PC backups. The backup database became corrupted, and while I tried all of Microsoft’s suggestions… only the last one worked. And, of course, the last one is to tell WHS to erase all PC backups in its matrix.
Worse, I was replacing a hard drive in a laptop at the time, and lost all the data on that system. Thankfully though, there wasn’t anything really of importance on it.
I think this symbolizes two things. One, you should never rely on a single backup. That’s why I have Mozy on my primary Mac and PC, and ensure all critical files flow into those systems so that they’re backed up online.
And, two, that Windows Home Server is a first generation product. It’s a good first generation product, and like all good first-gen products… it does its job well. But, there will be some bumps along the way, but so long as you take the typical precautions you always should (backup, backup, backup)… you should be fine.
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Chris,
There is a registry hack that allows you to enable duplication of backups. This might have helped you in this situation.
I don’t think it would have… because the matrix itself was damaged. That workaround is kinda like having a RAID-0… it protects against hard drive failure, but if the directory structure is damaged, you’re going to lose the data all the same.
It would be interesting in future versions, though, to have the backup matrix be backed up or archived. I hope the backup wizard in the second release adds support to archiving PC backups to an external hard drive.
What caused the matrix failure? Hardware?
My PC Backup matrix’s failure appears to be software-related, not hardware.
If you read the Microsoft support article that I linked to, apparently it’s not uncommon (but not necessarily common either).
I do admit I’m not the typical WHS user, WHS helps me test Microsoft software without worry (Vista SP1 and XP SP3 have been running circles around all my systems)… so my backup activity is much more intense than the typical WHS system.
Ok, did you loose data on the server in the shared folders, or just the backups?
No, again, only the PC Backup Matrix was damaged. The shared storage is stored differently than PC backups are.
That’s why you are limited by the primary drive’s size for shared storage. Shared storage can only be placed on the boot drive, and then mirrored to a second drive.
PC Backups on the other hand can be placed (and span) several hard drives, because of the SQL-based storage matrix that it uses.
Unfortunately, if that matrix gets screwed up in the slightest, the Backup Service will crash, and you can be left having to wipe all your old PC Backups out.
I think the best fix for Microsoft would be to implement heuristics and monitor why backup databases/matrices in their system have problems, and write self-monitoring tools to correct those issues.
Cool, thanks for that info!
“That’s why you are limited by the primary drive’s size for shared storage. Shared storage can only be placed on the boot drive, and then mirrored to a second drive.”
REALLY?
One of the reasons I was going to buy a WHS system was that I could simply add more drives to the drive pool and increase space for shared folders (naturally with duplication on for safety). Do you mean that if I have a system with 4 1TB drives, only 1TB is available for duplicated shared folders?
That would be annoying.