Geek chatter incoming!
A couple years ago, I was listening to my boy Leo Laporte on the radio. People were calling in talking about crashed hard drives and recovering data. In a flash, it occurred to me that most people only begin thinking about recovering data AFTER their hard drive has crashed. (Maybe kind of like people only consider home security alarm systems after they get robbed, but I digress). I decided that I wasn't going to be one of those people.
Shortly thereafter, I bought an extra hard drive and a copy of Norton Ghost. Norton Ghost takes a full image of your hard drive and backs it up to a separate hard drive. In theory it works pretty well, but in practice, it was a little clunky. I wanted to schedule backups, but didn't want to leave my computer on overnight. The backup images are huge, and I never got incremental backups (where only recent differences were saved, rather than full images) working properly. I finally resorted to manual backups, but manual backups are almost useless. The last Ghost backup I did, it reported back to me "Your last backup was 68 day(s) ago". That's bad.
Combine this shaky backup system with our growing hard drive consumption (lots of pictures and movies of Herself), and it was becoming clear that a longer-term solution was needed.
Enter Windows Home Server.
WHS is a "headless" computer. It's just a box… no monitor, keyboard, or mouse. You plug in the power cord and a network cable, and push the power button. That's it. To interact with it, you install software on each of your home computers, and you can then use that software to set up the server.
Here's what it does for you:
1) Backups
WHS can automatically back up ALL computers on your network every night. The first backup is a full image, and each successive backup is incremental. It's also smart enough to know that if you have two identical files on multiple computers, it will only store a single copy of that file in its backup database, as well as a reference to what computer that file live on.
It keeps rolling backups from the last couple days, last couple weeks, and last couple months.
Computers that are sleeping or hibernating are automatically woken up, backed up, and then put back to sleep again.
WHS can support a huge amount of storage space, and important files can be mirrored across hard drives so that if any single drive fails, no data is lost.
Compared to my old backup scheme, this totally rocks. Everything is automatic and efficient.
2) File Sharing
You can store files on the WHS (like a network drive) and access them from any computer, and access them from the Internet. This isn't really anything new, but a handy feature.
I'm pretty sure you can also log into the WHS, and from there use "Remote Desktop" to log into any of your client PCs. I haven't played with this yet.
3) Picture and Media sharing online
A big selling point is easy sharing of pictures and movies to family and friends. I haven't played with this part yet.
4) Media sharing to PS3
Movies and pictures can be streamed from the WHS to the PS3. Not totally useful yet, but a has potential for coolness in the future. Store all your music and DVDs on the Home Server, and have them available for instant recall from your PS3, Xbox, Media Center PC, or whatever. I'll definitely play more with this when I get my PS3 Slim!
It wasn't all smooth sailing, though. I was able to get everything set up properly and did manual backups of my desktop (XP) and laptop (Windows 7). However, they weren't waking up overnight to do their automatic backups. I did some tweaking, and think it's all working properly now (they both woke up and backed up last night). They didn't go back to sleep/hibernate, though, which I thought they were supposed to. It's unclear if WHS is supposed to force the computers back to sleep, or if the computer will it's own Power Management control panel settings to sleep/hibernate.
Now that I had a successful backup, I was able to take out my extra hard drive (the one that I was storing Ghost images on), and load it into the WHS. You can "hot swap" drives, which means add them into the server while it's up and running. WHS recognized that I had installed a new drive, and with a click or two, I was able to add that hard drives capacity to the total storage. WHS abstracts your storage away from physical drives. When you browse to the WHS network drive, you don't see a C: or D: or anything, you just see folders.
I've copied over a bunch of pictures and home movies into a "Photos" folder. I was able to mark that folder as "Secure", which means that WHS will automatically keep a copy of that folder on separate drives. Kind of a looser, software version of RAID.
Because my laptop is so new and doesn't have much loaded onto it, I think I'll try doing a full system restore. If it fails miserably, then I just reload everything that's on there now (not much). If it works, that will be the big payoff.
Still some work left to go, but so far, I'm pretty pumped about it.
A couple years ago, I was listening to my boy Leo Laporte on the radio. People were calling in talking about crashed hard drives and recovering data. In a flash, it occurred to me that most people only begin thinking about recovering data AFTER their hard drive has crashed. (Maybe kind of like people only consider home security alarm systems after they get robbed, but I digress). I decided that I wasn't going to be one of those people.
Shortly thereafter, I bought an extra hard drive and a copy of Norton Ghost. Norton Ghost takes a full image of your hard drive and backs it up to a separate hard drive. In theory it works pretty well, but in practice, it was a little clunky. I wanted to schedule backups, but didn't want to leave my computer on overnight. The backup images are huge, and I never got incremental backups (where only recent differences were saved, rather than full images) working properly. I finally resorted to manual backups, but manual backups are almost useless. The last Ghost backup I did, it reported back to me "Your last backup was 68 day(s) ago". That's bad.
Combine this shaky backup system with our growing hard drive consumption (lots of pictures and movies of Herself), and it was becoming clear that a longer-term solution was needed.
Enter Windows Home Server.
WHS is a "headless" computer. It's just a box… no monitor, keyboard, or mouse. You plug in the power cord and a network cable, and push the power button. That's it. To interact with it, you install software on each of your home computers, and you can then use that software to set up the server.
Here's what it does for you:
1) Backups
WHS can automatically back up ALL computers on your network every night. The first backup is a full image, and each successive backup is incremental. It's also smart enough to know that if you have two identical files on multiple computers, it will only store a single copy of that file in its backup database, as well as a reference to what computer that file live on.
It keeps rolling backups from the last couple days, last couple weeks, and last couple months.
Computers that are sleeping or hibernating are automatically woken up, backed up, and then put back to sleep again.
WHS can support a huge amount of storage space, and important files can be mirrored across hard drives so that if any single drive fails, no data is lost.
Compared to my old backup scheme, this totally rocks. Everything is automatic and efficient.
2) File Sharing
You can store files on the WHS (like a network drive) and access them from any computer, and access them from the Internet. This isn't really anything new, but a handy feature.
I'm pretty sure you can also log into the WHS, and from there use "Remote Desktop" to log into any of your client PCs. I haven't played with this yet.
3) Picture and Media sharing online
A big selling point is easy sharing of pictures and movies to family and friends. I haven't played with this part yet.
4) Media sharing to PS3
Movies and pictures can be streamed from the WHS to the PS3. Not totally useful yet, but a has potential for coolness in the future. Store all your music and DVDs on the Home Server, and have them available for instant recall from your PS3, Xbox, Media Center PC, or whatever. I'll definitely play more with this when I get my PS3 Slim!
It wasn't all smooth sailing, though. I was able to get everything set up properly and did manual backups of my desktop (XP) and laptop (Windows 7). However, they weren't waking up overnight to do their automatic backups. I did some tweaking, and think it's all working properly now (they both woke up and backed up last night). They didn't go back to sleep/hibernate, though, which I thought they were supposed to. It's unclear if WHS is supposed to force the computers back to sleep, or if the computer will it's own Power Management control panel settings to sleep/hibernate.
Now that I had a successful backup, I was able to take out my extra hard drive (the one that I was storing Ghost images on), and load it into the WHS. You can "hot swap" drives, which means add them into the server while it's up and running. WHS recognized that I had installed a new drive, and with a click or two, I was able to add that hard drives capacity to the total storage. WHS abstracts your storage away from physical drives. When you browse to the WHS network drive, you don't see a C: or D: or anything, you just see folders.
I've copied over a bunch of pictures and home movies into a "Photos" folder. I was able to mark that folder as "Secure", which means that WHS will automatically keep a copy of that folder on separate drives. Kind of a looser, software version of RAID.
Because my laptop is so new and doesn't have much loaded onto it, I think I'll try doing a full system restore. If it fails miserably, then I just reload everything that's on there now (not much). If it works, that will be the big payoff.
Still some work left to go, but so far, I'm pretty pumped about it.
5 comments:
I think that you will be very pleased with WHS. I have been using it now for over a year.
The back feature alone is great. I to remember ghosting drives in case of failure. I have to agree that imaging is a pain especially to get the incremental backups.
I have used the restore function a few times. Mailnly just to test it out. It works great. I really like the option of selecting which day to restore from.
There are a lot of addins that go with you WHS. Check out the wegotserved.com site for a list.
There is a lot that can be done with WHS. I use it to strema music while I am at work using Subsoinc. I also use it for a email server using the XXX.homeserver.com.Not to mention the remote capability. Not only to all your files but, to each pc in your house if it supports RDP.
I think that you will be very happy with the WHS. I know that it has come in very handy.
WHS is great. I've been using it since the first release and when my wife's PC failed a few months ago, restoring it was a breeze.
The Video/Picture/Music streaming (I use a a PS3 and a Popcorn Hour) is fantastic. If you want to stream MKV files, be sure to get the PS3 Media Server plug in.
As for backups, WHS can only wake up machines on your network. It cannot put them back to sleep. I believe there is a plug-in called Lights Out that will put them back to sleep, or use the PC's own Power Management settings.
There is so much to explore with WHS, and it keep getting better.
yes you are right & whs is great thanks for sharing this info
Rohit
Content Writer
Data Recovery services
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