WHS hotswap

[MetalDwarf]

I run a small business and have a few computers I am planning to backup on a WHS box.

The WHS will provide a backup, but will not provide protection in event of flood/fire/theft.
For that I really need an off-site backup, I have been taking home a monthly backup on DVD.

Since WHS duplicates data across multiple disks, would it be possible to simply have two hot-swappable disks, pull one every day when Ieaving to go home, and alternate between disks.

I would always have one disk with a copy at home and one disk at the office. every time the disk swaps the data gets caught up so i always have a up to date backup.

Does WHS freak out when a drive disappears? or would this work?

 

[nitrobass24]

I run a small business and have a few computers I am planning to backup on a WHS box.

The WHS will provide a backup, but will not provide protection in event of flood/fire/theft.
For that I really need an off-site backup, I have been taking home a monthly backup on DVD.

Since WHS duplicates data across multiple disks, would it be possible to simply have two hot-swappable disks, pull one every day when Ieaving to go home, and alternate between disks.

I would always have one disk with a copy at home and one disk at the office. every time the disk swaps the data gets caught up so i always have a up to date backup.

Does WHS freak out when a drive disappears? or would this work?

1. I dont reccomend that. Thats just a bad idea.
2. Backups are not duplicated.

 

[MetalDwarf]

I used to do it with tapes back in the day. One tape always at home, one tape always at work. We would run a backup once a week and swap the tapes. I suppose you could do the same thing with a RAID1.

 

[MetalDwarf]

what if I got one of these things, in addition to the WHS and just took that drive home at the end of the day?

So I would have say 2x500gb in the WHS doing the backup/folder duplication thing. and then a separate duplicate of the WHS on a removable 1TB drive.

 

[nitrobass24]

There is an Add-in for WHS that will backup your Backup Database to a HDD.

So that add-in plus a hotswap dock like the BlackX or similar would work.

 

[SC385]

There is an Add-in for WHS that will backup your Backup Database to a HDD.

So that add-in plus a hotswap dock like the BlackX or similar would work.

http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2009/04/21/windows-home-server-backup-database-backup-1016-released/

I've never used the add-on myself but I think you would plug in the hard drive without using the pool and set the backup location as that drive letter. It also looks like there are check boxes that allow the backups to be duplicated on different drives in the pool.

 

[nitrobass24]

Yea thats the addin Im talking about.

I havent used it either so I cant really comment on how it works.

 

[cavediver]

I use the WHS BDBB addin to backup my backup database to an external HDD. I have the external HDD attached via USB and NOT added to the storage pool. I have two external HDD's that I use for the BDBB backups and I swap them out every couple of weeks. The BDBB addin will also backup the backup database to a network share, so it's not limited to drives directly attached to the WHS machine. The BDBB backup works great. I've used the BDBB backup a couple of times to restore my backup database when I've had storage pool drive failures that impacted or corrupted the backup database.