One of the most requested features (or should that be “biggest missings”? 
) in Windows Home Server is the ability to backup the server itself. Sure, WHS is looking after all of your home computers, but who’s looking after WHS? If your home server fails – what happens to your backups? If there’s a fire, or your house is burgled your data is still at risk.
Online backup services from KeepVault and Jungle Disk allow you to backup your files to online servers, which is great but comes at a price, takes a while to upload and download and hits your bandwidth. Going forward, I’m sure we’ll all store a lot of our data up in the cloud but right now, we need a simple solution.
Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 brings new external backup capabilities to WHS, allowing you to regularly backup both your shared folders and your home computer backups to an external USB drive, which can then be safely stored offsite. Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Add an External Hard Drive to Windows Home Server
Whilst the external hard drive won’t be a part of the storage pool, you do need to let WHS know it’s there. So we fire up the Add a Hard Drive Wizard from the Server Storage Tab. The help file gives you a little more basic information.
Step 2: Select How You Wish to Use the Hard Drive
Okay, we just need to tell WHS that this drive is for backups, rather than adding the drive to the storage pool. If you check out the linked Help file here, there’s a few things to note:
- Windows Home Server pulls its Single Instance Storage trick here again, so after your first server backup, subsequent backups only save changed files to the hard drive, saving valuable space.
- Advice is given not to backup your server frequently, as the backup database has many large files that change regularly (and therefore will fill up your drive quickly). However, no advice is given as to how regularly you should backup the server – is it a monthly thing? Quarterly? How frequent is “frequent”?
- As you’ll see from the next few steps, you can backup different folders to different drives should you wish – this allows you to manage your backups efficiently if you run out of space on one external drive.
Step 3: Choose to Format or Not Format the Hard Drive
Unlike adding a hard drive to the home server storage pool (which mandates you formatting the drive), you are given the option whether to format the hard drive or not, which gives you much greater flexibility if you need to utilise the hard drive for other purposes.
Step 4: Give the Hard Drive a Name
Okay, we now just need to name the hard drive (maybe with something more imaginative than “EXTERNAL_BACKUP” – okay, I was in a rush here ) – note the handy hint to also write the name of the hard drive on the hard drive itself so you can identify it easily should you need to restore.
Step 5: Confirm What You Just Configured
You may be about to format, so WHS gives you a warning to make sure your happy with your selections.
Step 6: Preparing the Hard Drive
I chose to format the drive, so that’s the first job WHS needs to do to prepare the drive. After a short while, adding the hard drive is complete.
Step 10: Your External Drive Appears In the Server Storage Tab
Your external hard drive now appears in the list of drives in the Server Storage Tab, listed under Server Backup Hard Drives.
Step 11: Your Home Server Appears in the Computers and Backup Tab
Click on over to the Computers and Backup Tab, and you’ll see that your home server is now listed. From here we can run an external backup. Let’s take a look at it.
Step 12: Click on Your Server and Select Backup Now
Here you can configure which of your shared folders you’d like to back up to your external drive, as well as backing up the Home Computer Backup database. Simply select your drive from the dropdowns and click Backup Now. If you check the box, WHS will remember your settings.
Step 13: Click Yes to Begin Your Backup
Note that the backup can take a few hours and most importantly, that your home computer backups are suspended whilst you’re backing up your backups
Step 14: Your Backup Begins
Your backup begins and you can keep an eye on progress whilst it runs.
Step 15: Backup Complete
After a while, the external backup completes, and you can view details of your last backup in the Computers and Backup Tab.
Find out more about Power Pack 1:
Power Pack 1 In Depth – Remote Access
7. January 2008 at 3:08 pm
Is there a link to download this??
7. January 2008 at 4:23 pm
Finally, this would reduce my last (current) worries about my WHS!
You say USB drive, but could this be an eSATA drive as well?
7. January 2008 at 4:34 pm
how does the backup work? is it intelligent enough to just backup the differences?
7. January 2008 at 5:17 pm
This look fine, and well integrated. However, there is no information about how you recover from a system disc failure? Is there another recovery CD for the server? How does this work?
8. January 2008 at 4:11 am
So what about the SYS (C:) volume? Can we backup this up to an external drive (easily) now?
8. January 2008 at 6:48 am
It appears that backup of WHS can only be to locally attached drives. Have you tried getting WHS to backup to a network share (\\otherPC\WHS_Backup) ?
Thanks!
8. January 2008 at 10:50 pm
Can you backup the server automatically? It seems like all the tutorials out there make you click BACKUP NOW to initiate the backup of the server. This is a great start, but if I haven’t backed up in a while and my house is on fire, I don’t see myself waiting for a backup to complete before running out the door.
8. January 2008 at 11:33 pm
Yep, it’s a manual backup.
Terry
5. April 2008 at 3:51 am
Yeah same question – is eSATA supported? (I don’t see why it shouldn’t be)
28. April 2008 at 8:54 pm
Isn’t it ironic that, while WHS backs up all client PCs over a network automatically, the proposed backup facility for the WHS device itself is to a USB attached HDD and is manual only.
29. April 2008 at 8:16 am
How does it handle the initial size of a shared folder and its growth?
1/ WHS is configured to back up my videos folder (200GB) to an external HDD (500GB). After few days/weeks/months, the size of my videos folder become > 500GB.
2/ My videos folder size is already > 1TB and I want my WHS to backup this shared folder.
Thx.
29. April 2008 at 11:45 am
Miles
External USB backup means that you can take your drive off-site to protect against physical damage such as fire or theft….
Francois
The only option here for you is to split your Videos folder into a number of smaller folders. Different folders can be backed up to different drives.
Terry
30. April 2008 at 9:43 am
Thanks Terry. As the Videos folder is the only top folder shareable via WHS Media Connect without tweaking my WHS, this new feature is worthless for me. So using a sync tool (SyncToy, Robocopy, etc…) on Videos sub-folders seems to be the only solution. Right?
10. June 2008 at 3:55 pm
If I have more external drives is the backup going to be spanned?
3. September 2008 at 9:17 am
Hi Terry,
I like this a lot, but like DanB already asked, how can I restore when needed?
Bert
3. September 2008 at 9:44 am
You can forget about my question, it’s all there in the help file.
Bert
9. September 2008 at 1:22 pm
I really hope they include the possibility of automatic backup soon, because this is a task that really should be automated.
15. September 2008 at 1:37 pm
HOW About The WHS itself. I got it, One can back up the computers, can backup the data which is duplicated anyway, but if the home server dies (HD or any other hardware failure) I am stuck with backup and backups of backups but no sustem to use them.
So how do you back up the WHS ITSELF so that you can reconstruct it in case of hardware failure . . . .? ? ? ?
I would really like to know that…
16. December 2008 at 1:59 am
Is there a way to script the backup and schedule it using windows scheduler. I would like to automate the server backup so it kicks off once a month.
Anyway, have any ideas?
19. December 2008 at 3:26 pm
I must have missed something here we all talk about how to back up the server to an external harddrive but what do we do when it is time to restore the back to another pc after we have lost the server?
12. January 2009 at 10:22 pm
Terry,
There is a strikethough on “as well as backing up the Home Computer Backup database.” – and, while I can se “Home Computer Backups” in your screen there, this is not listed on my WHS at home.
What this a pre-release feature that was pulled, or what is the story?
I see the backups of the home computers as the most important part here.
Regards,
Brian
10. April 2009 at 8:59 pm
@Brian Binnerup – I have the same problem (running Power pack 2). The “Home Computer Backups” folder doesn’t appear in the list of things that will be backed up when the server itself is backed up. Any ideas?
12. April 2009 at 4:52 pm
How about backing your home server off-site?
+1 CrashPlan, here is why:
1. It’s free. You don’t have any monthly fees while protecting data off-site to another location you know or trust. You can even “seed” your backup so initial data is not sent over internet, but is direct to disk.
2. It’s not anonymous P2p – you know where your data is. While you might not care because of encryption, you do care when it comes time to restore. It’s much faster to restore over LAN than WAN. (or simply transport disk!)
3. Destinations verify data independent of source. This is superior and more trustworthy that san S3. It’s far more efficient utilizing less bandwidth and resources.
26. May 2009 at 4:13 pm
Has anyone tried backing up a shared folder to multiple external hard drives (the folder won't fit on just one)?
I thought I could do this with internals and a hot swap, but it didn't work too well. When I switched to the next drive, it started backing up the same files again. If I use externals, should I keep all of them plugged in during the backup, or can I 'temporarily remove' one and have WHS still recognize that the files have already been backed up…?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Jess
2. March 2010 at 1:46 am
Hi Jess, Did you get any reply on this or did you find any way to do it? thanks – wil
2. March 2010 at 1:45 am
Is it possible to backup on many spare drives (like the WHS is 4TB and I have 4×1TB external drives, does the backp mechanism will ask me to change drives to continue its backup?)
9. May 2009 at 11:31 pm
i have the same problem, when i backup the server the backups folder itself doesn't appear. did you ever receive a recommendation on how to fix?. did you ever received
9. May 2009 at 11:32 pm
i have the same problem, when i backup the server the backups folder itself doesn't appear. did you ever receive a recommendation on how to fix?. did you ever find a fix?