My Home Server died a curious death. I didn’t loose any drives.. but the operating system started hanging. No more file copies, no more logging into the console, no more responsing to MSTSC. I had run this for close to 8 years, I think? Its hard to remember how far back. Sometime around when I got married, that we bought it, with Christmas Money. It has saved us 3 or 4 times with computer backups.
First job: 
Make sure I had a current backup of everything that was on the server. Could I get to the raw files? I popped a drive out, attached it to my Desktop PC using a SATA-to-USB .. and..
Access Denied! I had elevate my security level to gain access to the drive. Not a problem; I found Beyond Compare, and ran it as Administrator.
The other part of the equation was where to save the files. I had a 8 month old backup of the home server on an external hard disk that I brought back home from the office.
This is what Beyond Compare found for me:
- The files on the WHS drive are under x:\DE\shares.
- DE stands for drive extender.
- The DE folder is normally marked hidden.
- There’s actually another partition on the root of the home server, that has the folder structure for everything, and has soft-links to these files across drives.
- The folder on the right, G:\2013-12-29_16… is how Home server backs up files to an external hard drive.
- Everything is done via NTFS (or maybe it was FAT_32 for some of it). Very simple, straight forward stuff. I love it!
- I put Beyond Compare in “Left Newer and Orphans” mode – and it found stuff on the drive that was not yet in the (much larger) backup.
- Beyond Compare did a stellar job of copying the files.
Next up: BitTorrent Sync.
