Windows Home Server

[Sysmom]

Wow, earlier this Spring, my computer here at home bit the dust. The power supply blew, taking both my primary drive AND the backup drive in the box with it. (That was ... special)

After this frightful experience, my husband pieced together a KILLER machine based on Windows Home Server that simply backs up both our computers each night.

They're sold ready to go from HP - but he knows how to build them, and saved some money doing it that way.

Two 1.5TB hard drives sit on the network with all the data from both our computers and his work laptop. Every night, it backs things up incrementally.

Anyway, I had never heard of this before, and think it's just awesome. No special backup software to buy, everything came with the Windows Home Server License.

He remotes into the thing from his machine, it holds some shared folders of family pics, video, etc. There's no keyboard, no mouse, no monitor - the machine doesn't do anything else (besides the files) but sit there and look pretty.

Thought I'd share it with you. Total (including the OS) tag on the thing from parts from NewEgg was just over $400. Processor, hard drives, everything.

deb

[voyager529]

I beta-tested WHS when it was out, and I was saddened. Not because it was a poor platform or a bad idea, but just the opposite: it's a great platform and a great idea, but unfortunately too much server and too little home for mass adoption.

i have three reasons why I'm not running WHS right now. First is cost. Even though it's $99 on Newegg, I've modded XP Home to do all the server stuff I need. Second is that certain software I run doesn't run properly on a Server OS. Acronis True Image Home is one of them. Finally, there's the matter of the 'storage pool'. It makes alot of sense if you're setting and forgetting, but I worry too much about my hard drives dying and like to know what files are on what drives. WHS determines all of that for me and doesn't give me an option otherwise. To me, this is a problem.

I think that MS is selling this wrong. They need to make this in a 19" form factor, add in 2TBytes of storage, an HDMI output, a dual-input TV tuner card, a Media Center UI, and stick it in the living room. That amount of storage space is useful in a temporary fashion to users timeshifting TV and provides an immediate benefit. Everyone wants backups when things hit the fan, but depressingly few actually back up. Integrating a TiVo with a backup device makes it much more enticing to the general public. Add simple backup-oriented commands to the media center interface, and get the full server UI available via their remote desktop app. Put the PS/2 and USB ports in the front to make it easier to link up a mouse and keyboard for installation and such, give it a fancy LCD, put some tutorial videos available to watch directly on the device, and slap a $799 price tag on it. If anything is going to catch on, it's a device like this.

I'm glad you're having luck with yours, sysmom!!

Joey

[Sysmom]

Joey, I think HP and Dell are marketing machines that are beginning to sound like the one you describe.

We'd have had to buy a new OS no matter what our BU option was going to be. This was just SO much easier than dealing with a regular Windows Server or turning a Windows or Linux machine into back up solution.

deb

[twbogart]

I have had a WHS box since the first RTM. I was looking for a server that I could recommend to the average user, that wouldn't require a ton of experience in networking or raid. I needed reliable network storage, easy backup and was hoping for remote access. Windows Home Server accomplished all of this.
The greatest of these is easy backups. I understand wanting to know what information is on which drive, but if you loose a drive, it's pretty much gone. WHS has network storage that is available to all the machines in my house including the Mac, and Linux boxes. This storage is backed up on the server along with my individual Windows machines. When the backup system finds the same file on 2 or more computers (including the server), it only backs it up once. Best of all, I do nothing to back up my systems. After original setup of the server, it handles the backup process and scheduling, automatically. Every night it checks each windows machine for changes and backs them up.
When I lost my primary drive on my machine, I installed a new drive put in the WHS disk, typed in the server password and clicked restore. After chugging away for an hour or two, my machine was back up and running like nothing had ever happened. It is definitely worth the roughly $450 I had spent on the machine and software.
I even built one for my church to handle the backup process for 3 of the pastors at the church. If they leave their laptop connected to the network over night, it backs it up automatically. I know there are other ways to do this, but this was easy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is the ONLY way, but it is an easy way. There are several things M$ could have added. I do like Joey's Idea of the TV Tuner and the Media Center UI. Perhaps UPnP for a 360 or PS3 to access. However, I think they might confuse the average home user, which is the intended market.