Last Updated 11/Jan/2009
A First Look at Windows Home Server
Iain Laskey takes his first look at Windows Home Server and is impressed
Windows Home Server has had a rough ride to date. It was initially launched with very little fanfare and amongst those that had noticed it, it quickly developed a bad reputation for itself after a fairly serious bug was found - it could corrupt data held on it under certain conditions. Not a great start.
Around the middle of 2008 a service pack or 'Power Pack' was released that fixed this and various other shortcomings so is it now ready for the prime time?
Try Before you Buy
As with most Microsoft Operating Systems, Windows Home Server (WHS) is available for a nominal charge as a 120 day trial version although anyone considering this option needs to be aware it really is trial. You can't turn the trial version in to the full product by typing in a key, you have to reinstall it again, putting all your data at potential risk of loss. That said, the reinstall option should preserve the data as long as you follow Microsoft's instructions on performing the 'upgrade'.
So, what is it? In a nutshell, it's a cut down version of Windows Server 2003 with a simple front end bolted on to make it as foolproof as possible. Microsoft would prefer you bought it as a prebuilt server from the likes of HP but you can also get it as an OEM copy for around £80 to £100 pounds in the UK
What you get for your money is an intriguing set of facilities, especially to anyone with a lot of data and more than one PC. At its most basic level, it provides a set of shareable folders which you can use to store your photos, movies and other files. It also backs up any PCs attached to it up to a maximum of ten machines. The first backup can take some time but subsequent ones are rather quicker as it only backs up the changes. The idea is that if your PC's hard disk fails, you simply replace it, insert the recovery CD, boot off of that and restore your entire machine from the server. In theory all well and good but things like SATA drives might muddy the water if your PC needs drivers for them in order to work. However, a quick look at the WHS Support Forums shows a lot of helpful people who can probably get you out of a fix if needed. The system slowly purges old backups to avoid filling your disks up although it will keep certain ones for longer to allow you to go back to a previous point in time through a configuration screen. As well as the full restore, you can also restore individual files or folders and with backups happening daily, you can be sure your data is safe. You can even configure the system to wake up a PC and then back it up, if it's powered down.
What is really clever is that the PC backup part uses a tried and trusted technique called Single Instance Storage borrowed from Microsoft Exchange. Windows Home Server backs up at the individual cluster level and if it finds more than one PC with an identical cluster (quite likely if you have say 2 XP machines, both with Microsoft Office) it just creates a pointer to the existing copy rather saving another identical cluster. This can produce a substantial storage space advantage. Two PCs, both with 200Gb of applications, data and files might only end up needing 300Gb of space to back them up.
Windows Home Server also keeps a list of valid users to help control and manage access to the various shared folders. All this is managed through the Windows Home Server Console which is installed on each PC. The server itself can be safely tucked away in a loft or garage if desired - it no longer needs a keyboard or mouse once set up with everything being managed via the Console.
Drive Extender
One of the key pieces of technology that allows Windows Home Server to perform its magic is Drive Extender. This allows you to add as many hard drives as you want to a pool of storage. It is preferable for instance to have 2 x 500Gb drives rather than a single 1Tb drive as you can configure specific folders to be duplicated. This makes the server keep separate copies of any files on multiple drives so if a single drive fails, a copy of your data is safe on another. The drives you add to the pool can be internal (PATA/SATA) or external (USB/Firewire,eSata). WHS will maximize whatever it has to ensure the safety of the data. If it can't duplicate data you have requested, it will warn you. It's not possible to duplicate backups of PCs though which is a shame but that sort of makes sense if you think about it.
Whilst we're on the subject of warnings, the Server will flag any issues found across your network on any PC currently in use. Such warnings might include out of data anti-virus signatures, drive problems and any other issues that could impact the integrity of your data.
Other Features
Windows Home Server has a few other features such as remote access, media sharing and support for WHS add-ins and we'll look at some of those in more detail in other articles.
We think Windows Home Server deserves serious consideration if you have more than one PC at home and need an easy to use solution for data sharing, backup and monitoring of your network's health. It's also a great way to recycle an older PC and any spare drives you may have lying around!
