Downside of Switching to WHSv1 form Win7?

[davephan]

You shouldn't switch to WHS if you care ability to recover your system quickly. If you use Windows 7, you can recover the system with an image to a point in time when everything worked in less than 30 minutes. If you use WHS, the only recovery path is a painful and time consuming manual rebuild. All accessory programs and configurations may need to be re-done.

Do you use imaging now? If you don't use imaging you should. You can use Acronis, Ghost, or other products. There are free products like Partition Image is Not Ghost and Clonzilla, so there isn't a reason not to periodically image your system.

If you need to have a lot of disk space, then you could use RAID for redundancy or a file copying utility like SyncBack. The free SyncBack version would be fine for file copying. Another way is to setup a separate unRAID server. UnRAID is very efficient. Only one drive is used for parity, so your storage efficiency is n-1. With WHS, the storage efficiency is very poor, only 50% of your raw drive space.

If your SageTV system is used every day by many people, then the system is a critical system. You don't want the recovery process to take days or weeks instead of less than 30 minutes. Lack of a good WHS recovery method is the main reason that WHS is a bad idea.


Dave

[jnmfox]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

If you are in the pool you are going to hit the DE limits when trying to run commercial skip and it can/will bring system to a crawl.

Personally after 2 years of WHS I havn't looked back since going to W7 for the server everything runs so much smoother and better now using raid to and couldn't be happier. Although it is a more expensive option.

What type of RAID set-up are you using?

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by jnmfox

What type of RAID set-up are you using?

Currently Raid 5 if I would have had the money to get the card I wanted I would have done Raid 6.

[kmp14]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

The difference is that WHS can't be reliably backed up (well, you COULD restore the system drive, but it will not recover the pool tombstones). The thing is, WHS is good for doing JUST what it was designed for, which is running a windows backup server and network storage volume on very low powered, inexpensive hardware. I certainly don't see the point in building a New WHS for sage. I'd only consider the WHS version of sage if, for some reason, i already HAD a WHS device on the network. It is nice that sage created a WHS install/control panel, but I wouldn't take that to mean it is a preferred solution.

I couldn't agree more. Having WHS gives me peace of mind that all my important files AND PC configs are getting backed up. For me, putting Sage on on a Win7 PC means that the entire PC is getting backed up by WHS, including all the custom scripts and apps I run to maintain and tweak Sage. More than once had to revert to a day or 2 earlier, and with WHS backing me up, all I had to do was pop in the WHS restore disc and my W7 Sage box was back in business.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by kmp14

I couldn't agree more. Having WHS gives me peace of mind that all my important files AND PC configs are getting backed up. For me, putting Sage on on a Win7 PC means that the entire PC is getting backed up by WHS, including all the custom scripts and apps I run to maintain and tweak Sage. More than once had to revert to a day or 2 earlier, and with WHS backing me up, all I had to do was pop in the WHS restore disc and my W7 Sage box was back in business.

There are better more reliable backup programs that don't require running a seperate pc. WHS backups fail from time to time and will erase all your old backups as well I have seen it first hand.

[kmp14]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

There are better more reliable backup programs that don't require running a seperate pc. WHS backups fail from time to time and will erase all your old backups as well I have seen it first hand.

I have been using WHS for 3 years, and never lost my old backups, plus I use it for other things, like the media sharing, remote access, as a network storage pool, etc.

Are there other products that do the image type nightly backups that do it incrementally like WHS does? In other words, I am not aware of a backup product that allows me to boot from a CD, and restore my whole PC from any date within the last couple of weeks, and not store an entire image each night.

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

There are better more reliable backup programs that don't require running a seperate pc. WHS backups fail from time to time and will erase all your old backups as well I have seen it first hand.

Yikes, that really inspires confidence......

Originally Posted by kmp14

Are there other products that do the image type nightly backups that do it incrementally like WHS does? In other words, I am not aware of a backup product that allows me to boot from a CD, and restore my whole PC from any date within the last couple of weeks, and not store an entire image each night.

Acronis True Image does incremental images.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

Yikes, that really inspires confidence......


Acronis True Image does incremental images.

That is what recommend but pretty much any good backup program does incrementals these days.

[kmp14]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

That is what recommend but pretty much any good backup program does incrementals these days.

Incrementals that can restore the whole PC? I am asking, not second guessing, I really don't know. I had True Image that came with an external drive, but it was crappy, but that was 4-5 years ago.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by kmp14

Incrementals that can restore the whole PC? I am asking, not second guessing, I really don't know. I had True Image that came with an external drive, but it was crappy, but that was 4-5 years ago.

Yes. True image I believe is a very stripped down version of acronis.'you can get a free 30 day trial from their website if you want to give it a whirl.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by kmp14

Incrementals that can restore the whole PC? I am asking, not second guessing, I really don't know. I had True Image that came with an external drive, but it was crappy, but that was 4-5 years ago.

Yes. You can recover a PC with a full image plus incrementals. You can use a full image, differential images, and incremental images. You are recovering to a point in time. The software figures out which files are needed. You can make the incrementals very frequent if you need frequent recovery points.

I usually do periodic full images with Acronis and Ghost. It doesn't hurt to have redundant recovery methods on some systems.

There is a trial with Acronis, but it does not work to recover. You have to buy it for the recovery to work. Acronis True Image is on sale from time to time. I bought 3 copies for about $60 from the Acronis web site. If a sale isn't occuring, you can Google for coupon codes to reduce the cost and you can still purchase from the Acronis web site and do not have to purchase from an untrusted web site.

Many years ago, Acronis did have problems. They fixed those problems. Also, many years ago Ghost had recovery problems too, before version 7. You might consider using a product like Acronis or Ghost on each PC. The backup of the boot drive can be done to a secondary drive, then copied to an unRAID server. Or, the image could be done directly to an unRAID server.

Acronis on-line backup is another option too. It is very slow though. It takes about 3 - 4 days to backup about 50 gigs. If you have 20 meg broadband, it does not help, it will be slow. There might be other 'on-line' backup solutions that are faster.

If manual backups are good enough, then you might try using Clonezilla. All imaging should be done to hard drives, never directly to DVDs. The DVD recoveries sometimes fail.


Dave

[stevech]

I've used Acronis TruImage for several years on several PCs. I use the clone capability to do a literal dupe of a boot drive to a spare drive. Easier to just boot that if needed due to a fault. I also do drive imaging weekly with True Image. I don't do incrementals; rather have the last n backups.
I don't backup my video files partition on the RAID1 pair, except for keepers.

SecondCopy is what I use for selected files/directories.

[Trepidati0n]

Moving to a slightly different system myself. My mother board has 6 SATA ports and 4 of them can be put into RAID 5.

-- Main Server --
SATA4 Main OS will be Win7
SATA5 BD Drive
SATA0-3 RAID5 Array (4x2TB)

WHS will be run as a VM on Win7
SageTV will run on Win7

--Local Backup--
Use a simple 2 Drive NAS with 2x2TB Drives for important data

--Offsite Backup of critical data --
Crashplan

[Slipshod]

I have 2x HDHR, 6TB+ of drive pool space using WD Green drives, 3 extenders, and comskip everything as it records. No issues at this point (though I do see the meaningless system drive failure message).

The only time I've had issues recording to the drive pool in WHS was because of the default JRE version (1.6_0) Sage installs. As long as I rename the JRE folder to force Sage to use the system Java version, I have no issues. Without that I end up with corrupted recordings when 4 shows record.

About my only gripe is the mandatory midnight driver check. WHS runs a chkdsk or something similar on all the drives around midnight, and it causes major stuttering in playback. I'm really supposed to be asleep by then, so it's not as bothersome as it could be since it's more of a "get your ass to bed" alarm for me. If I watched late TV it would be a complete deal-breaker for me.

Oh, and one perk for using the WHS version is that you get a free placeshifter license with it.

[akoker]

I have to say that although I can appreciate the stability and performance of Win7 until there is a good auto rip feature option like the my movies rip 5 movies at a time option in WHS, the overall feature set gets dimenished for me. I want a machine that gives an easy ripping solution to movies.

[davephan]

If you haven't tried imaging and don't want to spend any money, you could download Clonezilla for free. Create an image of your boot/programs drive. Store the image on another drive. Then try replacing your original boot/programs drive with a 'test' hard drive. Recover the image to the 'test' drive. You can then verify that the boot/programs drive can be recovered successfully with an image. If the recovery failed, you still have your original boot/programs drive.

I haven't tried using Clonezilla on Windows, but I have imaged and recovered Linux many times. Clonezilla is very fast. After booting and stepping through several screens, the actual imaging or recovery process only takes about 2 minutes for 4.5 gigs on the boo/programs drive.

Imaged based recoveries are very reliable. Very early versions of Ghost and Acronis did have problems. The recoveries with both products are extremely reliable. and have been for many years. I have heard of some rare failed recoveries with the free program called Partition Image is Not Ghost. All my Linux recoveries with Clonezilla have been successful so far.


Dave