It’s not the backup that matters but the restore

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.

Getting an off-server backup of your files on WHS

Right, now that my Windows Home Server is up and running I decided it’s time to get a backup made of the files I just can’t afford to lose. In my case I met my wife ten years ago and every photo we have together are digital in substance. If I lose these files, I lose all record of the past ten years of my life.

I used to back these up onto tape and drop them off at a friends house but now that my photo drive is over the capacity of 1 x 20GB tape then the hassle factor is just too great.

My solution is to add a 300 GB USB drive to the WHS server and not add it to the spanned drive volume. Instead I chose the option to use the drive to backup files on the server. Then I selected the photo drive as the backed up directories. The backup completed in about 2 hours after which I left it hooked up so I could do the next backup quickly from the console. When I go away for the weekend now, it’s just a case of ejecting the drive and dropping it off at my friends. This way if the cats set my house on fire I won’t lose anything of major value (I pray those bl@@dy cats die in the resulting fire).

My wife is a reserved word

Funny thing happened to me today. I tried to create a user account on my WHS box for my wife Con. It failed, stating that Con was a reserved word and could not be used for a user name. Apparently there is a list of device names like LPT1 and CON (short for console or keyboard) that Windows will not allow as user names or folder names. It all goes back to a hack circulating in the days of Win95 and NT4 where a malicious person could gain elevated privileges by manipulating folder paths.

Who knew? So now Con is forced to be Connie on our little network. Nevermind, it could be worse, she could be Constance.

Windows Home Server is my new best friend

As you will know, last week, or maybe the weekend before I put a Windows Home Server (hereafter known as WHS) box up in the back room. Basically I was looking for a backup and file server solution so I wouldn’t accidentally kill my digital photos and thereby risk d-i-v-o-r-c-e.

All of that 1/0 goodness worked out just fine. But one of the side effects was that I am now able to backup the desktops in my house reliably and simply. Of course we all know that making a backup is definitely not the same as restoring a backup.

That moment came for me last night when a Sony update fried my wahines Vaio laptop. Blue screen on boot and a blue screen trying to get to safe mode usually means an evening of badness for me. Prior to WHS I would have been sitting up all bl**dy night reinstalling Windows.

Last night I simply put the backup boot CD into the drive and followed the “Vizard”. Thirty-five minutes later Con’s laptop lived again, negligible data loss, no nasty anglo-saxon words. I am ass-pounded that finally technology has reached the point where what they promise is actually what they deliver. Wonderful.

Irreducible Complexity, how Jesus humped my network

There was a time, maybe eight or nine years ago, before VMWare, before cheap SAN’s and even before blogging sites when if you wanted to do anything more complex that simply consume technology then you were led into the evil of the faux server.

The faux server was the spare desktop PC that you reformatted and put Windows 2000 or NT4 onto and used it to teach you how networked computers, well, worked. And then it bred. With itself presumably since within months you had box after scabby old box all pretending to be servers. File servers, Exchange servers, MSSQL servers, web servers. Oogenesis at work.

I was that guy. I think at the high point of my illness I had 14 different boxes all connected to my network. A full AD domain with a mail server and an antivirus server and all that shit. Horrible. Especially since it caused me to fall victim to that other complaint, the dreaded “yeah-i’ll-find-a-home-for-your-old-shitty-hardware-itis”.

No more. I can’t be trusted with a hardware setup that complex. I can’t be bothered having to baby-sit complaining antivirus servers, blacklisting by spamhaus, hard drives cooking themselves all at the least opportune moment. I commit myself to the cloud.

So, before that f*cker Jesus can come along and kill yet another of my hard drives I have done the following. My file server has come down, to be replaced by a WHS box with 4 spanned redundant drives. A low cost SAN has appeared in my network. My domain controller has been retired and the domain shot in the back of the head and buried up in a swamp near Port Carling. My web server has come down and my web site is now the problem of WordPress.

My network is as simple as it can be without me installing MSN Explorer and wearing a skirt.

By the way I was joking about killing my domain, it’s buried nowhere near Port Carling.