Ouch! I had no idea it was that scarce. I also have no idea why someone would pay $150 for it over a just getting an OEM copy of Win 7 Pro. I guess if they were somehow in love with the WHS dashboard..... but even then, the backup feature in WHS is garbage and you pretty much are looking at enterprise pricing on a backup solution that will even install on WHS.
Well, now, Pil-grim!! I never thought it was garbage. It saved my A**!!
I'd made a mistake with my sig-rig and the hard disk became unbootable. I grabbed a spare, carefully -- slowly -- deliberately -- went through the procedure for restoring the OS to "bare-metal." I got it all back -- pristine -- perfect -- from the previous night's backup.
I thought is was pretty sweet. You "register" the machines on your LAN which have Dashboard installed. You then configure backups for each one, from any single Dashboard session. You may then have to tweak your volume shadow copy configuration on each machine, and make sure the "system reserved" partition -- ~100MB -- is adequate to the backup tasks.
After the first backup, the remainder are incremental, and you can duplicate them in a drive-pool as desired.
I'm guessing I'll eventually need to replace WHS with an "Essentials" version of whatever Windows Server version is extant. If I don't want to pay, I'll have to use the Win 8 option that I saw touted by Maximum PC.
UPDATE: Just check the resellers again. They upped the ante. 2012 Server Essentials is just $100 or so more . . . Amazing.
AND AGAIN: The backup feature for client systems works fine -- for Win 7 installations. I think you'd have trouble or simply "No cigar" for Win 8 clients. In that case, you might have a local backup configuration for a Win 8 client, but the other server features would still be there.