The first backup takes a while (I think my clients required in the 1-hour to 2-hour range). But apparently you’re not aware that all subsequent backups are incremental. Assuming you’re not changing gigabytes of data on a daily basis on your clients, the regular backups take just a few minutes over ethernet.

“But wait, what sense does it make to trust WHS, for restoring any PC client when in FACT, WHS doesn’t even by default provide a way for WHS customers to backup WHS?”

Have you thought this through? Just because you can’t easily backup WHS doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it to backup your clients. I find it pretty unlikely that my backup server will crash due to a hardware failure and then at the very same time one or more of my clients will also crash.

In the unlikely event that your WHS fails, then you fix it and rebuild it if necessary and then perform fresh backups of your clients. You’re down for as long as it takes to replace the part, plus about 3 hours. How often do your clients fail? I’ve used the restore function a few times for hard drive replacements and to workaround issues that I was too lazy to troubleshoot, but I haven’t had a hardware failure of my clients since starting WHS about 8 months ago.

“Surely, for a backup server, end users will need to insure their backup server can be backed up as well, right?”

It’s a nice-to-have so you can sleep better knowing you’re protected from an incredibly unlikely coincidental sequence of events, but in my opinion you’re overstating the importance of this feature.

Let’s just take a look when using WHS. First, there’s the need of backing up your PC client/s to WHS. That’s going to be painfully slow, using Ethernet as compared to a eSATA solution.

Then there is the additional need to backup your WHS data, as suggested by Microsoft. Until KB 946676 is resolved, the data corruption design flaw isn’t helping here either…

But wait, what sense does it make to trust WHS, for restoring any PC client when in FACT, WHS doesn’t even by default provide a way for WHS customers to backup WHS?

If WHS for any reason what’s so ever fails, like for the same reasons like a PC client should fail, for hardware failures, WHS will NOT be available to restore your PC clients.

Surely, for a backup server, end users will need to insure their backup server can be backed up as well, right?

Why bother to upload 4GiB-9GiB of backup online, using WHS, without insuring WHS can be working as needed later to restore them backup images?