Restoring WHS2011 to new hardware - Considering the approach options.

Question

My Windows Home Server 2011 WHS 2011 was having intermitten failures, I was able to make a bare metal back up a week before it totally died. I rebuilt the server with a similar motherboard, with newer CPU, fan, and memory. I completed a fresh install of WHS 2011. During the install two empty HDDs were automatically created as the Server and Client Backup drives in the install setup process. Two "identical drives" containing the old Server backup and Client backup were identified as "foreign".

• What's the impact of importing the two "foreign" drives will I have access to the previous back ups?
• What's the impact of using the bare metal backup to restore the original image, assuming that will give me access to the old backups? ( I was concerned that the bare metal backup wouldn't recognize the new hardware)
• Should I just, bite the failure and reconfigure the new server and start my server/client backups over, formatting the foreign disks and adding the to the storage pool?
• Will I need to reinstall the server connection software on the client PCs?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Thank you. I used the bare metal back up I created earlier to restore the server. The server files like documents, photos, etc were missing but there was an option to recreate them.

So in short, I’m back up and running and have a couple backups successfully taken of clients and server.

Answer 2

Hello,

Windows Home Server 2011 is a home server operating system by Microsoft designed to help families keep their files and data automatically backed up, organized, and accessible1.

It follows the Fixed Lifecycle Policy, with mainstream support ended on April 12, 2016. As this version is end of support, this product will no longer receive security updates, non-security updates, bug fixes, technical support, or online technical content updates.

Windows Home Server 2011 - Microsoft Lifecycle | Microsoft Learn

Best regards,

Molly

Answer 3

Understood about the end of life for WHS2011. Would the restoration/recovery approach be similar for a supported server solution?

Answer 4

Hello,

It might be similar but different version may also have some differences.

Best regards,

Molly

Answer 5

Hello,

Thanks for your update, glad to hear there are some progress on this issue.

Best regards,

Molly