By Philip Churchill on March 17th, 2010
What Backup Policy Do You Follow?
Tranquil PC are asking the question "What data protection policy should you follow?"
Which is a question I am sure you have asked yourself before. Do you either ‘move’ your data files to the duplicated folders on the Windows Home Server, where your data is safe, or do you keep the data files on your PC and rely on the Windows Home Server PC backups facility?
Both scenarios are looked at with examples given to help you decide, which you can read here.
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Folder duplication (of shared folders) will guard against a single hard disk failure since the data is stored on another disk. This is pretty nice protection.
Because I want centralized storage of useful files like photos, documents, videos, etc. this is the method I use for that. The real drawback/danger to relying on folder duplication is it doesn’t prevent against user error. If I delete an important photo, or were to accidentally overwrite it with a bad crop or other edit, that change is duplicated. Until WHS has versioning, I can’t recover from this. The issue is that after a short while my bad changes are propogated to both disks and I have no way to go back.
The workstation backup however will manage this because it remembers the state of my computer over several days, weeks and months. So if I want to get back a photo I deleted a couple months ago, or restore a file that got corrupted by a virus, or whatever, I can do that from the workstation backup.
I really wish the shared/duplicated folders could support versioning. I know Server 2003 (on which WHS is currently based) can do versioning, but unfortunately there is a problem with using it under WHS (can lead to corruption), so they turned it off. This is one of the biggest holes in WHS that I see. I hope they fix this flaw in a future update or the next version.
When I got my Home Server, I decided to move all of my documents, music, pictures, etc over to it and use folder duplication. I try to make sure nothing is saved on my actual PCs even though I do nightly backups. Just recently I decided to start backing up my Home Server as well because what happens if something were to go wrong with it? All my files would be gone since I don’t have them stored on my PC. So I purchased a portable hard drive and have been backing up all of my important folders to it. I do this weekly and once I’m done backing the folders up, I place the hard drive in a fireproof box just in case the unthinkable were to happen.
I have also gone centralized storage for my documents, photos, videos, my movies, recorded TV from Media Centers, etc… I then have folder duplication enabled and do a local backup to an external hard drive using the Windows Backup tool. I have Windows Backup set to run on a schedule and can have it run several different types of backups (Full Data weekly, daily, Incremental, differentials, etc…). I then also have Carbonite running on the server backing up all my selected data to the cloud.
I do the same thing for all of my SOHO clients running WHS.
WHS does have versioning which has saved my hide more than once)! http://www.mswhs.com/2007/12/28/another-way-to-restore-files-in-whs-shadow-copy/