Last Updated 17/Feb/2009
Review: Windows Home Server User's Guide
Iain Laskey thinks this is an ideal book for anyone starting out with Windows Home Server.
| Product | Windows Home Server User's Guide |
|---|---|
| Company | APress |
| Web | www.apress.com |
| Price | From £24.99 |
| We like | Easy read, covers all the bases, suitable for non-techies |
| We don't like | Lacks deeper technical information |
| Rating | 7/10 |
| Requirements |
Windows Home Server User's Guide by Andrew Edney is pretty much what should have been included in the box when you buy Windows Home Server. Whether you bought an off the shelf solution like the various HP server models or built your own using the OEM DVD, this book tells you everything you need to know to get up and running as well as some background on what's going on in the behind the scenes.
The author has broken things down into sensible chapters which walk you through installing the software and more importantly the post installation jobs such as creating the user accounts and loading the all important Windows Home Server Connector software on each client PC.
Almost the entire book is really a series of step by step guides with copious screen shots to show you how to do things. There is just enough background information supplied along the way to help you understand some of the technologies Microsoft have employed such as the Single Instance Storage engine which sounds scary but is just a smart way of backing up information.
The book is full of tips which may be obvious to seasoned users but are very useful to novices such as making sure your username on the server matches the one on your client PCs (the ones you are connecting to Windows Home Server).
It usefully walks you through scenarios for restoring individual files as well as a full PC and shows clearly how easy this can be. We say 'can be' because it's not unknown for the restore to go horribly wrong when you find you start needing drivers for accessing your SATA drives or network card.
One of the most useful sections we felt was on the health monitoring of the system where it reveals the rules used to decide how to flag up decreasing disk space, unbacked up PCs and so on. This is one of the few areas that a user is unlikely to work out through just playing around with Windows Home Server.
We also appreciated the section on removing, replacing or adding hard drives which helps give a sense of understanding as well as expectation about the whole process. The act of adding a new drive then physically removing an old one will make you wonder if your data is going to go AWOL but as this section shows, WHS will do its best to move everything off the drive once you've told it you intend removing it.
Conclusion
On balance, this book does what it sets out to do. It describes all the aspects of building and running a Windows Home Server. The explanations are clear and concise and the vast number of screen shots make it easy to follow the steps needed to do everything. The only real problem is that WHS itself doesn't actually have that much functionality to play with. It backs up PCs, it saves files and optionally duplicates copies of them so any book is going to be pretty straight forward.
We'd have liked to have seen more technical discussion and background on the nuts and bolts of how things work behind the scenes to assist with fixing problems and the lack of such information does make WHS rather a black box - you know what it does but have no idea how. If it fails, you reinstall it.
Apart from that small niggle, we think anyone who intends buying or building a Windows Home Server should add this book to their shopping list. There's nothing here you wouldn't work out yourself after a few hours playing about but it's nice to know how it should work and to get some understanding of some of what's going on and why.
