One of the great new features in Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (SBS2011E) is the ability to backup the system drives easily. This was a feature that Windows Home Server v1 was generally lacking and is something that users have taken for granted at this point with newer, more full featured versions of Windows Server platforms. Microsoft has been doing a great job of making server administration easy for the novice in SBS2011E and Windows Home Server 2011 and includes a simple dashboard interface to create backups. This guide will show, using the current beta version of SBS2011E both the easy way to configure backups and the more full featured, but harder way. Read the full story
Sometimes you may want to uninstall a drive that you have connected to your Windows Home Server. WHS makes this easy and this guide and video tutorial will take you through the necessary steps to remove a drive without losing data. I had a colleague ask me how to do this so I figured that I would update the guide for others seeking help.
Please note: If you are passing disks through to a Hyper-V virtual machine or a RAID controller, this guide only covers the WHS portion, not extracting the drive from the virtual machine or RAID array.