Monday, June 1, 2015

Backing up Windows Home Server 2011

I tried to backup my entire WHS11 to a large external hard drive and found out that backing up to a drive over 2TB is against the rules!

So, a little research later I found this: https://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c0c0ecb1-7d48-4eb7-8c7f-7abea3794328/client-backups-and-server-backups-over-2tb

Long story short, add a QWORD to the registry in the following place:

To remove the 2TB limit in the backup wizard. 
HKLocalMachine\Software\Microsoft\Windows Server\Server Backup
QWORD MaxVolumeSize = n
N is some number larger than your volume size. 2TB is 0x1FDFFE00000 or 2190431223808 bytes

I used 21904312238080, so that should be good for a 20ish gig drive.

I don't know if it works yet, but I got farther than I did before.  WHS let me setup and begin the backup.  It's running now.  With any luck it should complete successfully, we'll see.

I don't get that if this was identified all the way back in 2011, why do I have to modify my registry in 2015.  Kind of like how WHS2011 still needs the UEFI hotfix run manually.  Can't this be a windows update?