I have a system running WHS2011 that is used as a file server and to backup all of the Windows client PCs in my home.  I am considering replacing this system with unRAID.  Using unRAID as a file server should be simple but is there an application that I can run on unRAID that will back up a Windows system that is running at the time, and then facilitate bare metal backups for times when a SSD/HDD fails?

I would suggest you look into this product, its free and designed to backup physical machines. It's simple to install and configure and you can point the backup to a network share on your unRAID server. This program makes you create a bootable disc and is designed for bare metal recoveries.

 

https://www.veeam.com/endpoint-backup-free.html

 

 

 

You can install your WHS2011 as VM for backing up the Windows clients, that's what I do.

Thanks folks.  Johnnie - does everything work for you with restores.  WHS had some issues with UEFI restores and I continue to have problems when doing restores like that and I have had to find other ways to restore - like the restore wizard that restores to another Windows client.

It's been like 3 or 4 years since I needed to do a restore, almost certainly not uefi at the time, first time I hear about uefi restore issues so can't help with that.

You can install your WHS2011 as VM for backing up the Windows clients, that's what I do.

Was this pretty straightforward to do or were there any tricks?  How much hard drive space did you give WHS for the system partition?  And I guess the client backups go into the main unRAID pool?

Sorry I confused WHS2011 with Win Server essentials 2012 R2, this is the one I'm using know.

 

I had WHS2011 before but on bare metal, but I'm sure there are people on the forum using it as a VM, you should search the forum, closest template should be Windows 2008 Server.

 

IIRC WHS2011 needs a 160GB system partition (although there was a way to get around that), but since vdisks are sparse you can choose 160GB capacity and it will only allocate the amount really used.

 

As for the backups destination I use a second vdisk on an unassigned device, but you can use the array.