I'm running WHS2011 on an HP Proliant Microserver. The OS is on a pair of 2.5" 350GB drives in RAID1 format. Currently I have 2 x 1TB + 1 x 2TB as data drives. The 2 TB is partitioned as 2 x 1 TB drives. Effectively I have 4 x 1TB partitions on 3 physical drives.
1 of the 1TB hard drives is dedicated to server backup. Since WHS server backup takes over the drive, I can't give it a partition on the 2 TB drive.
1 x 1TB hard drive + 1 1TB partition on the 2TB hard drive are dedicated to DrivePool. All shares on it are duplicated. I have 1 TB effective data storage space, which is plenty for my needs.
1 x 1 TB partition on the 2 TB hard drive is used to store client backups and is also a target destination for backups from other machines using CrashPlan. The clients I back up with WHS are not backed up with CrashPlan. It's only for a single floating laptop that my daughter takes to college. CrashPlan seems easier for that purpose than Hamachi, especially since the latter no longer runs as a service.
I have a subscription to CrashPlan+ for off-server backup. My intent is to backup the server backup, the client CrashPlan backup, and perhaps the WHS client backups, if those aren't covered by WHS server backup. My use of CrashPlan in that way is as protection against disaster, such as my house burning down or the server being stolen.
My first issue is that backup of the DrivePool requires backing up both parts of the pool, to get everything. That's a lot of duplication. Am I better off just pairing the 2 x 1TB drives with RAID? That way the primary data protection is RAID and backup of the data share sees only one set of data. My original use of DrivePool was because I had an odd collection of drives. That has changed as I've been able to accrue more similar drives.
My second issue is that I dedicated a 1TB drive to server backup and it filled up REALLY fast. Considering that I have CrashPlan for off-server backup, what should I be protecting with server backup that provides a means to restore the server? I have enough space on 2 other workstations on the network to use CrashPlan to copy some data (maybe the client backup directory?) to them, as redundant off-server backup that can be accessed easily.
Any suggestions are welcome. I don't mind effort reconfiguring drives, etc., to make all this work. But, once configured, it has to be automatic or I'll never keep up with it. If I were required to swap external drives in rotation, the scheme will fail.
Thanks for your help.
EDIT: Also, what recommendations do you have for using CrashPlan? It interferes with server backup so I can only run it outside the time that server backup is running.
Chris