I mentioned a few posts ago (we won’t talk about time between posts) that I was setting up a cloud backup solution.
I also still run local backups to a Windows Home Server setup.
A week or so ago, Heather mentioned that some of the pictures were missing from her laptop. I started looking, and discovered to my horror, that all the pictures were missing. 30+ gigs of pictures, carefully sorted and edited, all gone.
I still haven’t been able to determine what happened. The is no evidence that the drive failed, and I can’t quite imagine a drive failing with such precision that only the pictures, and yet all the pictures vanished overnight.
Whatever the cause, my first priority was to see what could be done to restore the pictures. I have a process in place that is suppose to use Microsoft’s SyncToy to replicate all the pictures from the laptop to a shared space on the server and then onto my desktop. However, the scheduling has been broken on the laptop for some time, and I had neglected to fix it*.
This would be my first attempt at restoring files from a Windows Home Server backup. Kind of surprising given that I have had the server running for the entire time we have been married. The restoration options are surprisingly good. I was expecting to have to blindly pick a nightly backup and overwrite the entire laptop with said image. While that is an option, they provide a file browser that lets you examine files in each nightly image. From there you can copy the files to an arbitrary location (even a different computer!) rather than simply restoring them to the location they were backed up from.
This let me recover a few key items, and place them on my desktop, letting Heather work with them while I ran some tests in search of the root cause of these issues.
Failing to find a root issue, I opted to restore the entire pictures collection and move on. It isn’t a fast operation given the sheer size of the collection, and was a nice reminder as to why I keep an Ethernet cable plugged into the router and coiled in the closet… at least I didn’t have to work at wireless speeds… and it still took a long time.
Even having taken a long time, it was remarkable how painless the restoration was compared to what I was dreading. I managed to have 100% of the files recovered within a few hours of discovering the problem. I would conclude this post with a hearty endorsement of Windows Home Server, but Microsoft discontinued the product at the end of last year, so… I guess it’s nice to know it still works.
-Jordan
*Suddenly that seems more serious, although I fear it would have simply synchronized the deletion of pictures through the pipeline rather than restoring the missing pictures. At this point I am afraid to turn it back on until I understand why the pictures vanished in the first place.
Nelsons 