Dude

I've been running WHS2011 for almost a year and it has performed flawlessly, I only have one add-in and that's "lights out", I loved it on WHSV1 and it works fantastic on WHS2011. 

A couple of weeks ago I installed a trial version of stable bit scanner to evaluate.  I went away on holidays for a week and whilst I was away I got an email from stable bit saying my c drive on the server was about to die.  Very strange, I am running a SSD as C drive.  When I got home my wife complained that none of her TV shows recorded whilst we were away, we use a Fetch box, which shares my network and users the internet to record TV using iinet, it isn't connected to my WHS.

I also noticed that the server had stopped backing up my client PC's, I wasn't too concerned as I had been away. 

When I started to investigate I noticed that there was an incomplete back-which I think it aligned with the date of the error message stable bit sent me, I didn't think much of it until I discovered the Back-up database had a corruption. 

Hmm that doesn't sound good, haven't seen that in 12 months of back-ups, so I did some digging and ran the clean-up suggested on the MS site and it restored the database with some lost back-ups.  It was the user data drive that was incomplete which was a worry, so I did a new manual back-up (Keep option) to ensure I didn't lose any data.

After the back-up database clean-up the back-ups started working again, after a couple of days I noticed that security essentials wasn't working on my client machine, I have been using this product for the past 3 years without any problems. Very strange, so I tried to uninstall and it wouldn't let me, something was seriously wrong with the SE set-up.   I don't know when this problem started and if it was related to the WHS2011 issues, it could have been the result of a failed update or worst a virus, oh well that's why I have WHS2011 so I can do a bare metal restore.

So I start the bare metal restore, I only want to restore the c drive and that looks fine in the back-ups, yet it wouldn't restore, I was getting some weird errors, now I was getting anxious, I really didn't want to do a rebuild. Reading the WHS2011 logs was unhelpful, I have a solid technology background but the messages where for application developers not end users.

I regularly back-up the server to a hard drive in the server (I have off-site back-ups as well) so I'm thinking OK I will restore the back-up database from the serer back-up to a date before the problem occurred, I have never done this before but it was a straight forward process.

After the database was restored I was able to do the bare metal restore of my c drive took about 43 minutes and I was up and running.

So a couple of lessons in this for me.

1) I will never run the clean-up again if I have a Database corruption, I should have restored it from the back-up to a known good point as soon as I noticed.

2) You definitely need to back-up the Server  PC Client back-ups as well as your Server data  

3) Keep the C drive to operating system and critical programs, keep all user data on another drive.

The flexibility of doing a bare metal restore from WHS when you need it is worth the money.

I still don't know what caused this sequence of events - very strange.