Question about Rollback RX and Windows Home Server

Hello,

I have read repeatedly here and elsewhere that using disk imaging solutions together with rollback rx isn't really sensible, except if you utilize sector-based imaging, which will increase file size. I have been very interested in Rollback, but now I have recently just purchased a Windows Home Server machine which does automatic, cluster-based backups of the attached clients.

I do not really understand much about disk imaging and backup, but as I understand it, the WHS creates an initial copy of a drive, and then a database of all the clusters on a hard drive together with their hashes and just backs clusters that have changed up. It can therefore back up several clients very effectively, because if they have clusters with the same hash, it doesnt need to save that cluster information again but can recycle it from the database for the first client it got that cluster from. Since this is not file-based (not sector-based, either?), will this work with Rollback RX or will the WHS just drive itself crazy trying to update it's database with always-changing cluster information?

I'd be really grateful for any and all information on this!

Regards,

Chris

 

Hi Chris,

I don't have any experience with WHS, but as an experienced RB user here's what I think...

RB should work fine on your client PCs, however I believe that a WHS backup of those clients will just capture either the 'baseline' or 'current' snapshot of your client's C-drive without any other RB snapshots. The reason I say this is because I believe that the WHS backup will only see those clusters (and the sectors within) that are tagged as 'used' by Windows (sectors used by RB are invisible to Windows)! Therefore, I don't think that the WHS backup will 'go crazy' because it won't even see any RB stuff. Finally, I also believe that upon restoring a client that had RB installed on it, you would have to reinstall RB.

However, I suggest that you ask Horizon Data Systems for a definitive answer.

Aaron