Great post from David at Tranquil around a topic that has created lots of debate over at the Microsoft WHS Forums - whilst Windows Home Server does a great job of backing up and protecting your home computers, so you can restore them quickly and easily in the event of a system failure, what happens if the server fails?
Some of the systems previewed at IFA this week have a reset button, to take the server system partition back to the factory installed state (ie. wiping and reinstalling the system partition). This won’t effect your data, but will mean you may have to set up your server agaon with regard to users, shared folders and remote configuration.
David’s been working on a solution for the Tranquil T7-HSA to ensure you can restore your server back to its fully setup state - sounds like it’s caused a few headaches. Check out how he did it.
September 2nd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
The fact that there is really no easy way to backup a WHS server completely and the difficulties in restore were the reason i basically punted WHS after the beta.. many of the beta testers brought this up and got a half-baked response to the extent of (You can always restore the machine, recreate the user accounts, and recopy all the files from your client machine…)
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:17 pm
I presume David at Tranquil developed this using WinPe. Irrespective, he and Tranquil deserve a round of applause.
I fully endorse John’s remarks about half-baked remarks from the Powers-That-Be!
Now then, anyone clever enough out there to advise me how to build such an elegant recovery solution?
February 11th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I checked out the link, however “David at Tranquil” does NOT tell how he did it. They only tell you how it works, so it’s pretty useless unless you buy Tranquil Home Server.