Restoring WHS Files?

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TechieSooner

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So, let's assume we've got all the machines in our home network all backed up to the WHS.
Then let's also assume we've got WHS backed up and offsite in case of fire.

Now let's say your house burns down. How on earth do you actually restore the data within WHS?

It looks to me like it stores it in .dat files. The question is then how to restore these? It looks like it stores them in randomly-named folders, which might be difficult to re-create on a new WHS restore. So would one open these .dat files in order to restore data from them?
 
According to the Microsoft doc here: http://download.microsoft.com/downl...Brief_-_Home_Computer_Backup_and_Restore.docx

It seems that scheduling a batch file like this and running under the Administrator account would work nicely?

Code: 
net stop PDL
net stop WHSBackup 
del D:\BackupBackups /f /s /q
xcopy D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4} D:\BackupBackups /s /e /h /r /y
net start WHSBackup 
net start PDL

Please note that just deletes and overwrites the Backup each night. Sooo if you want something more complicated then you'll have to modify it.
 
I just use the backup to USB drive thingy in the WHS console to backup the server to an external USB drive and take it to the office once a week. If you need to restore you just mount the drive and open it up using the WHS utility thingy and drag files out of the mounted drive. works just dandy for me. I haven't had to use any batch files or anything yet.
 
I want something automated that's offsite

:)

I bought an offsite backup service for like ~~ $4/month, unlimited data... So, I'm going to use it. I just have to figure out, instead of backing up all 125GB of data, just how to backup the backups from the computers (which is only like 70GB).
 
Actually I just thought of a major downside to this... Doing that ensures that I have 70GB of NEW data each night... Offsite backup would see that as new data each night. 65GB of day upload ain't good... I'm going to have to reconsider how to do this.

Edit- My new thoughts... The offsite client software can be told to run during a certain timeframe.
So, I have two new batch files and scheduled tasks. 7AM, services will get disabled. 7:15AM-10:45PM, backup software can run as it pleases. 11PM, services get enabled again (for the nightly backups that WHS does).

Should take care of it... No double backup space taken up. And *hopefully* this will be more of an incremental (I'll just have to see how WHS works I guess) update that won't result in 70GB of data being uploaded every day.
 
Last edited:
TechieSooner said:
How can I schedule this?
Click to expand...

As of the current version you can't, but all it does is automate the steps as described in the kb articled linked already.

Although one possible workaround is to use the Synctoy powertool. To have the WHS server backup to another pc (offsite) although the restore part of it will be kinda tricky, but at least the data will be backed up.
 
Do you know if the WHS modify the .dat files each night, or append another whole backup to it? IE, if my laptop has 50GB of data, does the .dat change by 40GB each night?
 
I found this information in a document from Microsoft.

It *appears* it's entirely incremental. And even very smart (WHS creates hashes on all clusters of data... So if you have the exact same document on two computers, it'll only actually back that document up ONCE and point the other computer to that file... Very slick stuff).

That said, hopefully I can get my stuff backed up (Might take a couple weeks to transmit everything offsite) and write up a how-to guide on it.

The home computer backup solution in Windows Home Server has a single-instance store at the cluster level. Clusters are typically collections of data stored on the hard drive, 4 kilobytes (KB) in size. Every backup is a full backup, but the home server only stores each unique cluster once. This creates the restore-time convenience of full backups (you do not have to repeat history) with the backup time performance of incremental backups.

The home computer backup occurs as follows:
• When a home computer is backed up to the home server, Windows Home Server software figures out what clusters have changed since the last backup.
• The home computer software then calculates a hash for each of these clusters and sends the hashes to the home server. A hash is a number that uniquely identifies a cluster based on its contents.
• The home server looks into its database of clusters to see if they are already stored on the home server.
• If they are not stored on the home server already, then the home server asks the home computer to send them.
• All file system information is preserved such that a hard disk volume (from any home computer) at any backup point (time) can be reconstituted from the database.



Figure 2: Windows Home Server backup solution stores unique data once

The copies of the clusters that are stored on the home server in the order they are received. Additionally, the home server stores metadata files which allow it to deduce which clusters belong to which home computer at which times. The metadata that is typically stored for each home computer usually takes less than 5 percent of the space of the clusters that are backed up.

Some of the implications of this backup approach are:

• The first backup always needs to send the entire contents of the disk to the home server.
• The first backup of a different home computer needs to read all of its data but only transmit the content of those clusters that the home server does not already have from another home computer.
• Subsequent backups after little change typically only read a small amount of data on the home computer and send the new clusters to the home server.
• After you defragment a home computer, the next backup may need to read a large amount of data from the disk (many files will appear to have been changed), but it only sends a relatively small amount of data to the home server because the clusters have been reorganized, but they have not changed.

Note
The first backup should be of the home computer with the largest hard drive that is connected through a wired Ethernet connection, because the first backup of a home computer to your home server sends the entire contents of the disk to the home server over your home network.
Click to expand...
 
So did you ever figure out how to restore the DAT files? I know this is old but I had a complete disaster half self created...

Boot disk on my WHS died, restored from USB backup. Decided to restore my desktop machine via BMR, noticed only after it wiped the drive that there was only 2 backup's available......

Needless to say the backup failed at some point and it would not restore my system reserved drive and also seems like missing files on my back up.

Ended up wiping my secondary drive somewhere in the process so lost some of that important data as well.... Life is hell right now! ARGG..

So I want to manually mount the DAT file to see if I can do anything to examine them or recove the data with out the machine's directly connected anymore.
 
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