By Philip Churchill on January 15th, 2008
How to turn on duplication of the backups database
Blogger Scott Hanselman has the details on how to turn on duplication of the backups database, which is disabled by default on Windows Home Server.
Scott says that there could be a performance hit once it is enabled via a registry key and reminds us that it is totally unsupported but as he states “it’s nice to know it’s there“.
Get the details here.
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WHS can restore your laptop, but it does require more conditions to go right in order to do that as compared to many other third party solution.
I find Acronis True Image, as reported by many other bloggers, to be way easier, and unlike WHS, your not limited to the same computer to restore your operating system. Yes, Acronis True Image allows you to restore to a new computer and even of different hardware!
In addition, Acronis images can be mounted to extract any file, in a friendly Windows Explorer view.
Also, when I restore my operating system, usually “C” partition, it doesn’t require twenty minutes, as noted above, but less than 5 minutes for 20GB used memory partition!
Acronis also allows for network restore too, so you can do everything and more, and for a lot less cost compared to WHS.
In addition, Acronis offers many other advantages such as 256bit AES encryption for your backup image or file backups.
This isn’t to bash WHS, it just to point out how WHS doesn’t offer or provide as much as Acronis has to offer for backup. Maybe Microsoft will learn from Acronis, or will Microsoft limit WHS in FEAR or providing better disruptive technologies to it’s way of locking you in by locking you out?
What WHS customer want to void their WHS warranty to enable unsupported functions that were disabled by Microsoft? Especially when enabling this unsupported function it creates a significant performance impact!
Also by turning on the WHS duplication of the backups database, this isn’t going to provide you with additional backup protection, it”s just duplication of whatever files you had already backed up!
If you instead backed up your files to an external hard drive, you would have more peace of mind, not worrying when WHS will corrupt your data to LOSE everything, such as by an unscheduled reboot, or hard drive failure, etc…
Don’t forget http://www.support.microsoft.com/kb/946676 still has no resolution.
The online backup over the Internet is nice, but for a lot of home users you still need a working computer to restore the backup, unless someone (hint 🙂 ) provides a Linux bootable CD, DVD or USB method that will establish the online backup image to be restore back to the dead (software) PC.
Acronis, as mention above, provides incremental backups, which doesn’t require all this fuss like the WHS duplication backup method. Why can’t Microsoft take note and think to offer a better product in WHS?
I’ve used Acronis True Image in the past and when a pc when down and I tried to restore an image, it would not read the image and I had to create it from scratch.
I have also used Drive Image 7. I used to use this a work for software testing, moving images in and out all day and it never failed once. The only problem is that each image can be rather large and you would soon run out of disk space if you were to create new images every night.
Amazing how many Competitor blog crawlers there are that come on and post misinformation all in a vein attempt to scare people into buying their product instead. I guess they are all scared that they did not think of a better mouse trap first>>>>
Acronos? Good backup solution in some LIMITED ways. Does it offer centralized storage as well?….Nope.
Sorry, WHS is better….
WHS Restore? Is it easy as grandma’s apple pie? You betcha! Restored my 20 Gig laptop that crashed back to yesterday’s config in 15 minutes. Like it never even happened. Man, that’s good! Can I have another slice of WHS, please.
WHS data corruption? Does it have data corruption problems with ALL data types and conditions? Nope. Only a couple formats during a perfect storm situation. Have not had one problem with it in over a year. Oh, psst. The MS fix is around the corner too 😉
WHS Duplication fussy and mussy? Nope. Check a box and it duplicates your folders all by itself. Even works while I’m asleep so I don’t have to. Totally cool!
Somebody stop me….please. I’m having too much WHS fun…LOL.
I think that the new Power Pack 1 that is coming out will enable you to duplicate the client pc back ups too without the strain on the system.
Maybe good to do in a pinch, but I think I’ll wait for Power Pack 1 myself 😉 Still, not a bad find! Thanks for the info on how to do the tweak.
Thanks for your comments guys.
I’m a proponent of double back ups in WHS now because this happened to me:
Long story short:
Was having some squirrelly things going on in my PC and thought my system was corrupted. (it didn’t seem to be virus or spyware related) I said “no problem, I have System Restore and WHS back up”. So, after a couple of a “System Restores”, which didn’t fix the problem, I proceeded to perform a back up from before things went haywire from my WHS according to prescribed CD method. It looked like it was going good until about two minutes into it everything seemed to freeze. No go! No nothing! After a bit of investigating into what was happening I found that my hard drive in the WHS server had gone bad and it corrupted my PC hard drive. “Uh oh! , now I have a corrupted PC AND WHS server. I couldn’t even hook up the WHS hard drive externally to another computer using an adapter. (it would freeze there too…the WHS hard drive was shot!)
Ironically I had just been talking to a friend that suggested duplicating my back ups to another hard drive on the server but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Well… I have now! (but I never recovered all my old settings, email contacts, etc… good thing I always saved My Documents on a separate hard drive in my PC or I’d have lost a lot more.)