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We are up to three Windows Home Servers on site. They happily sit unassumingly in the corner of the server room each backing up a combination of 10 computers/servers.

Benefits of WHS.

  • Daily incremental image based backups of each machine.
  • Saves disk space by consolidating duplicate bits across images.
  • Easy access to files within an image through a fool proof UI.
  • Simple image based recovery, again, through a fool proof UI.
  • Did I mention a fool proof UI? I mean the thing is dead simple to use for backup AND recovery.

Our only problem at this point is keeping a list tracking which WHS a given network computer was originally connected to. I'd love something as simple but that can handle 30+ machines at once. Is there anything out there?

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  • P.S. - If someone with 2000+ reputation reads this can you please suggest consolidating the three Windows Home Server tags? Thanks.
    – GollyJer
    Aug 18, 2010 at 18:11
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    Ook, that's a messy set of tags.
    – sysadmin1138
    Aug 18, 2010 at 18:20
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    Why are you backing up PCs? The users should have their important data residing on a file server and then just back that up regularly.
    – MDMarra
    Aug 18, 2010 at 18:46
  • Synonyms created.
    – Bill Weiss
    Aug 18, 2010 at 18:49
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    @MarkM: Accepting that business data should be on a server computer there can be some utility to backing-up machines that have a complex software load and aren't able to be re-created by a simple "re-join the domain and let the software load from Group Policy" solution. The Windows SBS backup functionality is reasonably unique. I'd love to see a product offering with similiar functionality for a reasonable price. The server-side block-level deduplicated data store alone is enough to "sell" me. Aug 19, 2010 at 0:36

1 Answer 1

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I use this: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

And I think it is the coolest backup technology ever. It is linux, so you may have to deal with some issues, but I think it works well. It is file based however, I don't know about Windows Home Server, but backuppc doesn't do images.

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