Here’s a handful pre-sales questions from someone who’s been lurking on your site for years. And yes, I know this is a lot, so thank you in advance for your guidance and patience!

Despite now being 2026, believe it or not I’m still a WHS11 / Stablebit Drive pool user. A hardware & OS upgrade to a new install of S2K22 w/ WSEE is the goal. I’m learning this may mean moving the clients away from a Workgroup into a Domain as well as requiring a static IPv4 connection.

Starting with knowing very little about domains and directories, the learning curve is surmountable. But it may also take some local professional support to speed up my learning curve. So here goes…

With use being a 3-client home network environment running pro versions of W10 & W11 (and the expectation that that the client count wouldn’t ever double), first question is, how well will WSEE work in a Workgroup environment? Also, would I be hobbling WSEE if using it in a Workgroup?

With regards to my IP connection, if you presumed that my internet service is a local residential provider with a dynamic connection, you’d be right. The IP address seem to rarely change. Is upgrading to a static connection absolutely mandatory? And, if I didn’t upgrade it, what would the consequence be?

My last questions regard using the backup and restore feature Microsoft built into WSEE.

Would WSEE provide the ability to backup & restore of the data that’s actually on the server or just the clients? If the former, when backing up Stablebit pooled drives, would the back-up image be just of the disk volumes in the pool (visible or hidden) or would it also include the virtually pooled volume as well? Are you able to select individual volumes, and/or are you able to do both of the above?

Second, when restoring a client disk that had multiple volumes (drive letters) on it, is it possible to select specific individual drive letters to restore (similar to the way Macrium restores if you are familiar with that software)? Or when restoring are you limited to only restoring a full image of the client, meaning you overwrite all the volumes on a disk?

Lastly, when completing a full restore of a client that has multiple disks, each with multiple partitions on it, will the WSEE “see” and restore back to the multiple disks and place the partitions back on the disk it came from? Or as noted above, is the restore completed manually, partition by partition, disk by disk.

Thanks again for working your way thru all this as I’ve been working to educate myself in anticipation of using WSEE.