Windows Home Server versus Vista Backup and Restore Center

Question

I've been using Window Home Server for my backups here at home for most of a year now, and I'm really pleased with it. It's far better than the software I was using previously (Acronis). I'm thinking about a backup strategy for my work machine and I'd like to know how WHS compares with Vista's built-in backup and restore features. The plan is to do a full backup to a local external hard drive and backup the documents folder to a network drive on the server. Anyone have experience using the Vista backup feature like this?

Answer 1

Chris,

They're different beasts. WHS backup is pretty much automatic and uses deltas - Vista's is manual and I don't believe offers incremental updates.

While your solution (Vista + network copy) would preserve your data it has two problems I an see;

1. Your documents will only have the latest revision. If you find something was corrupted a month ago it could be very awkward to recover it. Vista's shadow copies may help though.
2. As soon as you install a program/patch/config your Vista backup is out of date and needs remade, or these repeated if you reinstall.

These might not be dealbreakers and indeed Vista's backup is pretty decent, it's just nowhere near as good as WHS. In my opinion WHS leaves almost everything else standing, you can be sure this tech will be in the "big brother" server versions shortly.

Answer 2

WHS is such a quick, simple, robust way to get your stuff backed up. Plug it in to the network; install the client software; done. I'd hate to live without it.

However, as a programmer, I also set up scripts to run each night and back up my pending changes to another machine. For example, when using TFS, I run 'tf workspaces' then 'tf shelve' on each workspace to make a copy. Shelveset names begin with 'z' to make them sort to the end of the list.

Answer 3

Also, remember that many backup strategies are busted in some way, and we don't find out until it's time to restore after a hardware failure. This is a bad time to find that out!

When you work out your backup strategy, test that you can actually restore from it. Do this periodically.

Answer 4

Vista Home Premium does not provide in its built-in Backup app the features for saving and restoring the OS image; it only does data and folder backups. For a home user to get the full disk image Vista built-in Backup support without going third-party, you need to have Vista Ultimate.

WHS is nice because it is "centrally" managed and does great things with power management and sleep, if you enable the features (such as waking a machine up in the middle of the night to perform a backup and go back to sleep). I am not familiar with the scheduling features of the Vista app, but the WHS feature set in this space seems pretty complete.

Macrium Reflect (there is a Free Edition which de-features some things) works under Vista and lets you save images over the network and restore them to a drive from a boot disk. I had used this as a solution for my Vista Home Premium host before I got my own WHS up.