Is there any standalone backup software as good as windows home server was?

[BD2003]

It's too bad they killed WHS, because the backup software was the best. It was reasonably fast, featured deduplication across your systems, delta files, automatic culling of old backups, you can pull out any file from any day and even live restore. Combined with the mirroring and drive pooling nothing could touch it.

Since then I still can't find any standalone software nearly as good. The built in windows 8.1 tools are terrible - an image backup with no options for folder exclusion, incremental backups or compression is horribly inefficient. The file history feature is an absolute joke. I'm trying to use acronis, but my options are A) backup very large files with serial chains of incremental/diff backups, which is fine for system images but horribly space inefficient for data file backups or B) the non-stop backup service which at least has delta files but is super slow and crashes so often it's useless.

What other options are there?

 

[Chiefcrowe]

I think it sucks that they discontinued it too. What do they want people to move to? and why, if it doesn't have similar features?

Maybe they want people to go to the cloud for this stuff? but i don't know of anything that can do everything that WHS could in the cloud realm.

 

[master_shake_]

i thought they wanted everyone to buy windows 8?

didn't it have most of the features whs 2011 had?

im sticking with whs 2011.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Nope, 8 doesn't have full system backups, dedupe and drive pooling. Server 2012 does have ReFS which has some commonalities but I have heard some iffy things about using it.

 

[Binky]

I'm still pretty damned happy with my WHS2011 box. It's the most appliance-like system I've ever had. Those backups have saved my ass many, many times.

I recently built a small Win7-based server system for a friend. I installed Amanda Network Backup, but i haven't really configured it yet or played with it. I'd be curious if anybody has any experience with it. I do plan on getting it running for him eventually so he'll be the guinea pig for me.

 

[BD2003]

Nope, 8 doesn't have full system backups, dedupe and drive pooling. Server 2012 does have ReFS which has some commonalities but I have heard some iffy things about using it.

It does have drive pooling in the form of storage spaces, but it's half baked right now.

Microsoft would like you to believe you don't need things like backup in a world with onedrive and the windows store....but that's ridiculous.

That said I do use onedrive as a form of off site backup, but it's not nearly comprehensive enough for me to completely entrust my irreplaceable family photos and videos.

 

[BD2003]

Just out of curiosity...does WHS v1 still work with windows 8.1?

 

[Towermax]

Just out of curiosity...does WHS v1 still work with windows 8.1?

Looks like it does, just barely, but only if your disks are formatted MBR, not GPT.

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index....restore-from-whs-v1-uefi-secure-boot-problem/