I have a whsv1 installation that backs up my home/work laptops. I have used the restore successfully every time is was needed. The last time was just a week ago when I have some corruption on my ssd boot drive. I managed to restore a windows 8 64-bit backup that was taken the previous day without issue. It took a few hours to complete but that's a small price to pay.
I'm just now a bit worried that I need to migrate to a different backup solution due to support etc. What I need is something like the whsv1 solution whereby I bootup the client using a cd/dvd/usb and I can select a backup to restore from (from the network).
What are other people on these forums looking at as alternatives?