wayner Posted August 28, 2017 Share Posted August 28, 2017 Does anyone have any suggestions regarding how to backup Windows PCs on my LAN to replace the backup and bare metal restore capability of WHS? My unRAID server has replaced my WHS server as a file server but I still have WHS running to back up all of my PCs. WHS was very good at doing nightly, incremental backups of all PCs on your LAN and it did this without needing a reboot. It also allowed you to do bare metal restores so that you could quickly get a PC up and running after a hard drive or SSD had died. There are some threads here about running WHS as a VM in unRAID but that seems like a lot of futzing around and it makes sense to move away from WHS as it has been dead for several years. Are there any dockers that could do this? Quote Link to comment
TinkerToyTech Posted September 1, 2017 Share Posted September 1, 2017 How about building a restore disc / usbkey for each client, then setting up a cron (curl?) job backing using control panel (win7) Backup & Restore method to user directories on the unraid? With CrashPlan Home Backup going away it's what I'm going to try. I'm also looking into Retrospect Network Backp for Windows but I don't know if it will do bare metal restore... @TinkerToyTech Quote Link to comment
wayner Posted September 1, 2017 Author Share Posted September 1, 2017 I have to look into the Win7 and Win10 backup and restore as it looks like it can do a system image. In terms of building the restore USB key - do you know if that is unique to each system or to each OS? In other words, could you make up one USB key for all clients that you have that are running Win7 32bit or do you have to make a separate one for each system? It is probably the latter as it may need drivers for stuff like NICs, etc. I wonder if you could put restore tools for multiple systems on one USB key as well. The other thing that I have mused about for backups is wondering if you can do the restore from an attached drive. My clients have either 128GB or 256GB SSDs. I could keep a spare 256GB SSD around and copy the backup image from the unRAID directory to the SSD and then connect the SSD to a local SATA port for way quicker restores. Or with 128GB you could even copy the backup image to a 128GB USB key as they are now pretty reasonable in price. Quote Link to comment
TinkerToyTech Posted September 1, 2017 Share Posted September 1, 2017 ok, had another idea to add to my first: Make a bootable USB key that will boot to a GUI that has the neccessary drivers and software to image the boot drive, and then write that image out to a network share. you could have it setup with a directory on the server per machine, keeping the last 3, then each time you make a major change to the system, i.e. a minor upgrades, before each patch Tuesday, etc, you'll be at worst be a state of no more than a month of lost time, with the OS backing up your machines to their network shares personal directory on a file by file basis as built-in to win10pro... ok, my two cents is up to a nickel idea, because this is solving the same problem I'm having... @TinkerToyTech Quote Link to comment
NNate Posted September 21, 2017 Share Posted September 21, 2017 I use Veeam Endpoint Backup (it's free). I believe it gives you everything we once had in WHS. https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html Quote Link to comment
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