Copying windows home server backup offsite
2013-12
Simon
What ways are there to copy a windows home server backup to an offsite location?
I'm talking specifically (and only) about the automated backup of my entire machine, and not the shared network folders.
I am 90% working away from home on my laptop which has a 640GB drive so the shared folders are essentially useless to me. I backup every night, but if my house burns down or broken into the I'm in serious serious trouble !
I'm really looking for some alternative way to back up my entire machine - which much not interfere with the reliability or speed by which my WHS backs up my laptop every night. Either a way to 'export' a complete machine backup from the server, or recommendations on non-conflicting software I can backup to a 1TB drive at work are what I'm looking for.
Note: I believe that WHS uses its own completely proprietary backup and doesn't use things like any 'backup bit' or 'archive bit'. I just dont want to install some other backup software that will conflict.
PS I'm now running Windows 7 and just realized that I should probably check out the backup functionality it gives me. I assume that won't conflict right!
Edit: Thanks for the hosted solutions. I'd also appreciate ways to backup to an 'offsite' location that I control - like my office vs. my home. The hosted solutions I think will be too slow or expensive for my needs.
user4197
Another alternative would be KeepVault. They seem to have better pricing.
IDisposable
You should probably look into several things.
First, regarding the use of shared folders, you can use Windows Live Sync to make any folder on your laptop (or elsewhere) get mirrored to the WHS's User folder of your choice. This will lead to bogus "File Conflict" messages because WHS can't replicate the open file .fslock that Live Sync creates (I've filed a bug report on this on the WHS Connect site). That said, though, the idea is that Live Sync will keep folders of your choosing mirrored no matter where you are. This will NOT give you historical backups, just current-version.
Second, regarding a backup of the WHS itself. I recommend using the BDBB add-in to force WHS to duplicate backup-database files to multiple drives. This will make you resilient to a crash of the primary drive on the WHS server (the C: SYSTEM and D: DATA partitions). I've survived a crash of those twice while retaining my complete backup history.
Third, if you want an offsite regular backup of the WHS server, you can use an external USB drive of sufficient size. When you plug it into the WHS server, you can opt to use it for system backups. It'll copy everything to the external drive and then tell you to dismount it. Now take that drive offsite. This is not a continuous backup, but it is better than nothing.
Forth, you can use one of the excellent tools listed in other posts... Mozy, JungleDisk (my favorite), KeepVault and let things backup to the internet. This can be kind of expensive, and is very slow to recover from, but your data is very safe.
Lastly, you can do my favorite thing. Using CrashPlan you can backup to some one else's machine over the internet. CrashPlan is awesome because you basically make an agreement with one or more people (like my father, brother and I) who all make backup space available to the CrashPlan program. It compresses, encrypts and stores my backups on all shared machines in our person "network", and each other machine on the network will store stuff on my machines. The way I use it is to have a big drive that I bought for my dad and my brother, installed it on their machines and setup CrashPlan. Now we can all survive a complete nuke-strike.
user4197
JungleDisk for WHS will put your data in the Amazon S3 cloud with no subscription fee. You pay $0.15/GB/month for the storage. It's currently in beta.
Matt Simmons
Since it's windows, it's conveniently partitioned off for you by drive letters.
Have you looked into ntbackup, the built-in backup solution? It would be trivial if you could mount the remote location as a drive. At the sizes you're talking about, I sure do hope the "remote" machine is on the same network, because that will take a while.
JakeRobinson
Mozy!!!!
Block-level incremental backup: After the initial backup, Mozy only backs up files that have been added or changed, making subsequent backups lightning fast.
Edit: Asus Web Storage as a WHS add-in.
Simon
I really hate the way that WHS backs up at a particular time in the morning.
First of all I don't EVER want my computer turning on when I am not there. EVER. I have a Core-i7 laptop which literally could burn the house down quite easily if it were to turn on in a bag.
I also don't ever want my PC to sleep unless I tell it to. I don't have hibernation or sleep enabled and this is the only way that WHS will sleep after a backup is complete.
I know that Windows 7 has the ability to disable waking up when on battery power but it doesn't seem to work on my laptop.
These are the possibilities (with wake timers left as default):
- 'Wake this computer for backup' ON - it turns on in my bag if i forget to turn it off - and stays on when the backup is complete.
- 'Wake this computer for backup' OFF - it backs up in the morning, but I need to leave the machine on all night.
- I say 'Backup Now' and then it backs up immediately. I can turn it off when its done if I'm still awake, but then that backup appears as 'locked' in the console and not 'automatically managed'.
What I'd really like to do is :
- Click 'Backup and Sleep' and then go to bed.
- It will backup immediately and then sleep the PC.
- This backup must be 'automatically managed' and not appear as a 'locked backup' in my console
- Show me a confirmation that everything was backed up successfully (or not) when I turn it on.
Is there any way to achieve this?
Simon
I finally figured out a solution to this that works quite well for mw.
Basically I wrote a script to run a backup and then sleep immediately when complete.
- Disable wake timers (if using Windows 7). This should prevent your PC from waking up at your normal backup time. Unfortunately there is no way to disable backups while still allowing manual backups to be triggered.
- Set the backup time to be a time when you're asleep - like 4-5am
- Replace 'IKE' below with the name of your server
- Rename C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server\BackupEngine.exe to _BackupEngine.exe. I couldn't find any other way to completely prevent backups being automatically triggered. When i turn on my PC again in the morning it was trying to backup immediately.
Run this .BAT file as an administrator (important):
echo %date% %time% ping ike sleep 5 echo STARTING BACKUP %date% %time% del "C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server\BackupEngine.exe" "C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server\_BackupEngine.exe" -a -d "Manual Nighttime Backup" -s ike echo %date% %time% %windir%\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Standby pause
Note: I had to delete BackupEngine.exe in the script because it gets repaired everytime the WHS console restarts on a reboot. If this file exists it will still try to run a backup when you turn the PC on again in the morning even if the backup time has passed. Doh!
For more details about the command to 'sleep' see this.
NOTE: This is still a work in progress. Has worked for a few days and i will improve this over time. I really really want to get this functionality into Vail (WHS2) if not already there.
Pär Björklund
If you set the WHS machine to wake up at night to do a backup then it should also sleep when it's done. Have you checked your power settings so that they allow the machine to go back to sleep?
There are some options that prevent the machine from going to sleep. In device manager for mouse/keyboard you have an option to prevent sleep.
nhinkle
I'm not specifically familiar with how WHD handles backups, but if it's similar to how Windows 7's built-in backup tool works, this should work. I'm not sure what version of Windows you're running on the PC you're backing up to the server; this would only work in Windows Vista or newer.
Check the Application Event Log (eventvwr.exe) for what event occurs when the backup is complete. There should be some sort of event for "the backup completed successfully" or similar. Once you find that, click on "attack a task to this event", and set the action to "run a program". Then, select a program to put the computer to sleep. I would recommend using SysInternals PsShutdown; it's a light command line tool which can put your computer to sleep. Set this to run as the action when the backup complete event occurs. This will make your computer go to sleep as soon as the backup is successfully finished. You could also just use the command %windir%\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Standby.
I am working on developing have created a light application which displays a countdown before putting the computer to sleep or hibernate, and runs after a backup. This makes the computer go to sleep when the backup is done, but give the user a chance to cancel the shutdown if they happen to be up late working. You can download it here. The installer automatically sets up the scheduled task, but you will need to install .NET 4.0 manually if you don't already have it.
GAThrawn
power settings on your machine should put the machine back to sleep after the backup completes. I do agree that the setting would be a good one though. Have you logged this as a suggestion via the Windows Home Server Connect Site? Http://connect.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver.
Thanks,
Kevin Beares