Folks: For a few years now WHS 2011 has been waking up the five computers in my home and backing them up every night. These are BIOS machines with replaceable parts. If anything goes wrong I can restore the machine with minimal data loss and without re-installing any software.
But now a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 has arrived on the scene and I am not sure what backup strategy should be used. The SP is a UEFI machine so I applied Hotfix KB2781272 to the server and installed the WHS connector software/Lights Out on the client. Now I can right click the Lights Out icon and do a file backup of C: drive to the WHS server.
I cannot back up the other two partitions on the SP. As discussed in other posts there is not enough free space on in the recovery and hidden partition containing the boot information to make shadow copies ... so they won't back up. This can be fixed, at least according to other posts, by moving the restore partition to a USB stick and resizing the boot partition. All the How To posts I have seen so far use a lengthy procedure involving the windows image management tools.
Question 1: Has anyone tried increasing the size of an SP partition using third party image management software? Does WHS 2011 image backup work after?
Question 2: Based on other posts, there are a number of image restoration issues to be over come. Has anyone been able to do an image restore from WHS 2011 to a Surface Pro 2?
Question 3: Given that there are no parts that can be replaced without Herculean effort, is it time to give up on image backup and go with file backup to a folder share on the server coupled with redundant offsite file backup to One Drive. Is this a viable strategy, given that the SP has three restore modes built in. Two of these leave your files and programs alone. A reset forces you to reinstall your application software even if you settings are backup in the cloud.
Question 4: Is the Surface Pro a three year disposable device that does not need image backup? When the battery dies in three years after the rated 500 charge/discharge cycles or if there is some other hardware problem preventing boot, do you just hit it with a hammer to destroy data in the internal SSD and throw it out the scraps? Or would you drop it into a docking station and use it a desktop?
Thanks in advance!