Yesterday around 3:00 pm my server decided to quit – this wouldn’t really be a “big deal” except that I also have my e-mail and run my website “Crazytrike” on it.
In December I decided to test Microsoft’s “Home Server” and see what all the fuss was about.
I put together some harware, added drives and installed the latested version of “Home Server” and in January began moving my movie collection to it, and as an afterthought installed the connector to my server and began running automated full backups on a nightly basis – apart from the nightly backup of my website.
Never thought I would need to use the backup (famous last words!)
Wednesday afternoon I got the opportunity to test out the restore feature of the “Home Server” backup. This couldn’t have been any easier:
1) Put in the “Home Server” Backup Restore cd into my SBS servers DVD drive and boot from it.
2) Ensure I had the latest drivers for my server’s hardware on a USB drive so the restore process could find it.
3) Once booted, the restore process finds the “Home Server” and then asks which machine you want to restore.
4) Select the machine you want to restore, and then the restore process begins.
5 hours later (yes my SBS server is fairly large -150gbs – even after I moved 1tb of movies to my “Home Server”, my server is back up and running.
Pretty painless considering the alternative.
