A New Kind of Home Computer: Windows Home Server Preview
by Ryan Smith on September 4, 2007 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
WHS As A Backup Suite, Cont
As for restoring data, WHS comes with two options. The first is the traditional per-file restore, which can only be handled by a client. When a user/client wants to restore a file, they will pick the date/backup from which they want to restore the file, at which point the connector software will mount a dynamically-generated volume that is the contents of the client as of that backup. At this point the user can copy over files from the backup volume to their hard drive.
For a more complete restore, such as in the case of a catastrophic failure or those looking to use WHS as an image backup server, WHS ships with a live-restore CD. When the restore CD is inserted into a computer, the affected machine can connect to the WHS server and select a whole backup to restore. Since the operating system is included in the backup, it is also included in the restore, returning the machine to the same state it was in as of the backup. This process does however wipe the client's hard drive in the process, so it's not something that can be used leisurely. Power users that will be using it as a way to image and restore machines will especially appreciate the ability to restore to volumes of arbitrary size, and while Microsoft isn't pushing the imaging ability hard, it's one the best features of WHS.
There are a few caveats with the backup features of WHS that bear mentioning however. First and foremost only machines running Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista x86 can be backed up. Older versions of Windows are not supported, and more surprisingly x64 versions of Windows are not supported. The WHS development team has cited the need to write drivers for the backup/restore abilities as the reason for the latter limitation, as they did not have the time to write a good set of drivers for both x86 and x64, so x64 support is not included for now. Unfortunately we don't have a good idea when such support will arrive; the development team for WHS is working on writing a version of the software for x64, but they are not saying when it might be ready.
Hardware constraints also need to be considered. Backups are transfer intensive, so anything less than a gigabit Ethernet link will cause the network to be the bottleneck. This is especially problematic for wireless links, which under 802.11g are practically capped to less than 6MB/sec (and realistically top out at under 4MB/sec), a fraction of the transfer rate of a hard drive. Microsoft highly recommends at least a 100Mb Ethernet link (forgoing a recommendation for wireless entirely), but wireless will work at the cost of being especially slow when WHS needs to do another full backup because it is ready to throw out the old one.
Last, there is the issue of doing backups at convenient times. A machine needs to be fully-on to be backed up, and WHS only has a limited ability to deal with AWOL machines and deal with machines that aren't currently on; it (or rather the connector) can wake up sleeping computers, but does not have a wake-on-LAN feature for waking up computers that are shut off entirely. An add-on exists that can handle this, but the only reliable way of backing up a machine at night is to leave it on or put it to sleep instead of turning it off. Sleeping however can be more problematic on an enthusiast computer than an OEM-built one.
With that said, it's very clear that Microsoft has put a lot of thought and their best technologies into the backup feature of WHS. Although this isn't a round up where we can adequately and fairly compare all the major backup software suites, we will say that we're very impressed with what WHS can do here. The backup features alone can sell WHS if the price is right as is the number of machines.
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leexgx - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
i think you mean {with out duplication) as if you got 2x 200gb with it turnd on you only get 200gb any way
i agree if raid fails it can be an problem some times getting the data off it
With WHS just plug the disk into an other pc and goto disk manager and Give the disk an Letter or mount it as an drive folder and you see all the data on it
tynopik - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
> i think you mean {with out duplication) as if you got 2x 200gb with it turnd on you only get 200gb any wayno, if you were duplicating EVERYTHING (which most people won't want to do) you will have 400gb*. 1st copy on the 400gb and half 2nd copy on one 200gb and other half 2nd copy on other 200gb
leexgx - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
darn miss read both posts i just read it like 200gb and 200gb a 400gb so assume last one was the 2 200gb put together to make 400gb----other post
i got you now on the 3 one if all 3 happend you lose data
tynopik - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
the other thing i forgot to mention is selective duplicationwhat if you have 500gb of files but only have 5gb that need duplication?
WHS is much, much more efficient in such a scenario. Only duplicating what needs to be duplicated and merging the remaining space
i can't wait for MS to include this feature in regular windows, it's freaking fantastic
ATWindsor - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
What if I want to have added protection on all my stuff? With raid 5 I loose 25% of the space, with WHS-duplication I loose 50% (and the performance is worse). Even people who wants an easy setup has diffrent needs.tynopik - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
> What if I want to have added protection on all my stuff? With raid 5 I loose 25% of the space, with WHS-duplication I loose 50% (and the performance is worse).that is only true if
1. you have 4 drives
2. they are all equal size
consider a scenario that i mentioned elsewhere where you have (2) 200GB drives and a 400GB drive
with raid5 you would only be able to use 200GB of the 400GB drive wasting half it's space right off the bat. So you are left with essentially 3 200GB drives. Then parity data takes up another drive leaving you with 400gb of space. Which is the exact same amount that WHS gives you.
but i will tell you this, RAID sucks, especially RAID5
you mess up one thing and you lose the entire volume
even with raid 1 i had more problems than it was worth
raid is just going to cause more difficulties and support calls, the exact opposite of what you want for a 'black-box' like this
and i'm not the only one who feels this way
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles?&id=29">http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles?&id=29
[quote]
However, at the agreement of our support staff, I estimate that anywhere from 25% to 30% of our customers with RAID will call us at some point in the first year to report a degraded RAID array or problem directly resulting from their RAID configuration.[/quote]
that sort of problem rate is simply unacceptable
and what if suddenly you decide that there is a bunch of stuff you DON'T need to duplicate? there is no graceful way to handle that with raid
WHS if simple, flexible, powerful and reliable (in the sense it's not likely to cause problems like raid systems do)
ATWindsor - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
There is many ways to mess up a whole lot of dta, raid or non-raid, I'm pretty sure i can make the datapool disappear pretty easy in whs also. (it can be recovered of course, but so can i raid5-volume).If people use problem-prone onboard raid-options on mobos, I'm sure quite a few run in to trouble, that doesn't make raid5 a bad idea for everyone. Same with your example with diffrent-sized disks, i happen to have 4 diks of the same size. Thats the problem with lack of options, people with needs diffrent than the exactly the ones that happen to be included gets a worse product.
AtW
ATWindsor - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
What if I want to have added protection on all my stuff? With raid 5 I loose 25% of the space, with WHS-duplication I loose 50% (and the performance is worse). Even people who wants an easy setup has diffrent needs.Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Performance of consumer-grade RAID5 controllers is EXTREMELY low. Sub-10mb/s typically, with a high CPU load, as they don't have a dedicated XOR engine. Server-grade RAID5 controllers will give you good performance, but they cost in the $600-1000+ range, and when you're using consumer-grade 7200rpm SATA drives, you can buy half a dozen extra drives for the cost of the controller.ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Software-raid has good read-performance if properly implmented, much better than a single drive. If you are going to have many drives, you must buy additional controllers anyway, so the price-difference isn't that big.