I thought I had read where it was possible to back up the DX4000 to a USB drive. I have a 1TB drive hooked to the USB port and I want to back up the 600gb of data I have on my DX4000. I cannot figure out how to do this using the Dashboard so I connected to the DX4000 with remote desktop and Windows Server Backup does not support backing up a host volume of more than 2TB. I don’t really want to have to use another backup software to back up the DX4000 because I want it to image the unit.
Is there any way to do this within the Dashboard or a good, free option for imaging the unit to a USB drive?
Well, I kind of worked around it. I still used the Windows Server Backup utility but I did a custom selection and chose all data, then deselected the “D” drive on the server and clicked only ServerFolders.
It’s still backing up all of the data but I didn’t ask it to back up the entire “D” volume, although I’m backing up esentially all of the data on that drive. I left the Hibernation file and System Volume Information unchecked.
When is this going to happen. According to documentation provided by microsoft this is available. WD must have removed it. Also, according to this page it is available already… http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=610
Quote from webpage…Choose the disaster recovery solution that works for your small business – local USB drive or backup to a cloud.
It is not possible to backup the DX4000’s OS because it is headless. However if you were running Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials software on a server with a monitor then it’s built-in. You would boot off the DVD and point to the backup drive. This is probably why the Server Backup option on the DX4000 doesn’t allow you to do backup the server or the shares to a external drive.
WD has blocked backing up the shares folders from the Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials Dashboard in favor of the RAID1 and RAID 5 implementation. I can see why, because WSS will fail backing up shared folders if they exceed 2TB. So the DX4000 's RAID helps with this issue. Since this is server software, you can still go in manually to backup the shared folders, but you will run into the issue above. You can manually do a Server OS backup if you attach a external backup drive, but because it’s headless, you will not be able to restore it. This is why Western Digital allows you to download the Dx4000 Server Restore DVD from online. You will restore the server to how it was when you started. You will have to reinstall any software or Windows Updates manually. This is done much the same way as restoring the headless HP MediaSmart servers.
So anyways, I have 2-3 different client sites that I was looking at rolling out some kind of a NAS, however I want all of them to backup the server to rotating external drives, I don’t really care if it backups up the OS, but the cleints data needs to be backed up, and I don’t like the idea of the client having to pay $250-1000 a year of cloud backup. I had seen that you could run Backup Assist, however it costs $249, and starts to make the WD Sentinal “Total Cost of Ownership” get to high… This was the same major flaw that Windows Home Server, had, and the same reason that I NEVER sold them to any of my clients.
You MUST be able to backup the data that is on the server, without the client having to do anything besides plug in a different external drive, and the server automaticlly backs up the correct data, regardless of what ext drive is connected.
So has the “patch” made this possable, or do I need to look at a different solution?
Not sure if the patch does what you want, but there is an entire version of Windows on the box. If the built-in software can’t do it, find a backup utility that can and install it on the server. It may take a few tries to find one that works right for you, but I can’t imagine more than a few will have problems running under 2k8e.
Please note that even if WD enables USB backup, or if you buy Backup Assist, both have a 2TB limit. This is because Backup assist uses the native Windows backup engine. The limit is related to the limit of a .VHD file and won’t go away until Windows 8. The other WSSE box available in the North American market, which includes an integrated removable drive, has the Microsoft imposed 2TB limit on server self backup to the removable drive.
I’m using a freeware software to copy my image directories to an external hard drive. In this scenario, how would I be able to restore my client data if my DX4000 crashed? I would have to rebuild the client store information somehow to be able to get back up and running like I was prior to the DX4000 crash.
I like what the DX4000 does with user backups but like others have said, I need a way to get the DX4000 data to something I can take offsite. I can’t do that right now and have a reliable medium to restore from if my office burns down. My off-site data is no good if I can’t rebuild that data so I can do client restores.
WD has partnered with KeepVault. You can use this addin on the DX4000 for cloud backup or offline backup to a external drive. You do have to buy a minimum subscription to get this going. it’s not free.
