I was a fan of Windows Home Server for the server I keep in a closet at home to centralize backups and media sharing. I liked how it could backup all the computers in the house to a central location with little or no intervention. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but it worked well enough.
When I replaced that server a few years ago, WHS had been retired by Microsoft and now it was replaced with Windows Server Essentials 2012 r2. I ran that for a while but it was never as solid as its predecessor. Then the backups got flaky and the client wouldn't install on my son's PC and I got sick of messing with it and decided to find a new solution, at least for the critical task of backup.
I found urBackup, a freeware application that comes in Windows, Linux, and Mac varieties. It was easy to install and setup and has been very solid. I installed it on my Server Essentials OS after disabling that backup and replacing the client software on all the clients with the UrBackup client. The true test just came last night when I needed to replace my son's hard drive after a SSD failure. I cannibalized another SSD from a retired laptop we had laying around and restored to the bare drive via a urBackup bootable USB stick that was easy to create from a downloadable iso file. It all worked flawlessly and he was back up and running this morning after the restore ran overnight.
I am so glad I made this decision before that drive failed or my son would have lost a lot of work as he is a musician working on his first album.
I've also done some file restoration when Lightroom corrupted a whole bunch of raw files that I was moving from one drive to another and that saved me too.
So I just thought I'd share. It's a solid product and you can't beat the price!
https://www.urbackup.org/
