Without some special quiescentce logic, it would be like pulling a plug on a running system without proper shutdown.

But, how are you going to make sure the Windows system storage is not in some intermediate half-broken state at the exact time snapshot happens? So, you want to boot Windows from a block level extent hosted on FreeNAS and use ZFS snapshots in place of system images?įreeNAS does not care. Will somebody please take a minute and explain this to me? Thank you in advance. I may be getting lost in FreeNAS terminology, but the BIG QUESTION for me is, can FreeNAS do the same thing? Is that what Snapshots can do? Can FreeNAS do it, but with only a specific plugin or expert knowledge of some scripting? If it does work, will it only work from the client computers themselves running Windows Backup, in which case only Windows Pro or Ultimate machines will work across a network? This has saved me more than a couple of times when the main hard-drive in one of my network computers has gone down I just replace the drive, boot from a 'Windows Server Boot CD,' which guides me through restoring my entire drive from the server to the new drive, just as if I had cloned the old drive right before it died (assuming last night's backup was successful). But this is not only a backup (multiple file versions) of data files, but entire 'system images' of each computer. I'm used to using Windows Servers - Home Server and 2012 R2 Essentials - both of which can be set to automatically back all your computers on the network (pro and home versions alike).

I think that I know the answer to this question from reading the documentation, reading other posts here and elsewhere on the internet, but being new to FreeNAS, I don't want to assume.

Drive snapshot or windows system image