Right, so far I have had my Windows Home Server for about six months or so. And in that time I have had to use the restore function of it’s backup application three times. Twice when I fried my wife’s Vista laptop trying to remove and old SAN driver and once on the upstairs Vista desktop when an automatic driver update bjorked the video output.
In all three instances the restore job executed flawlessly. As anyone who has ever had to deal with backup solutions in the work place knows, it’s not the backup that’s the problem, it’s the restore that gives us all the shits. The number of times I have seen poor bloody server admins tossing aside invalid backup after invalid backup just to get some application server back up and running (pun intended).
Just last week our corporate email server went down like a sack o’ shit and the newest backup they had was from December, December 2007. Stupid pricks.
Anyway, I love Windows Home Server. Not because it’s sexy (it’s Windows after all) but because something as fundamental as restoring a backup actually works. As a side note we have a friend who is a little retarded when it comes to computers. And she has three children who are absolutely l33t at screwing with operating systems and installing malware. Since I am condemned to support the poor cow I am using the WHS backup to store a snapshot of her desktop as it is when I rebuilt it last (SP’s, Office, AV et. al.) so that when her kids inevitably bjork it again it will be a 30 minute restore not a six hour rebuild. Ha.
