On the heels of two major blows to the revered Windows Home Server product (the removal of Drive Extender and HP’s refusal to continue manufacturing the HP Media Server), I’m left wondering what my next move in the home networking arena will be. Over the last 2 years or so, I’ve been using WHS as a centralized storage system, and have also grown to enjoy some of the more advanced features WHS has to offer. With Microsoft’s and HP’s apparent lack of interest in the product, I’m now left asking myself: what’s the next move? Should I stick with the current version of the product, forsaking all future feature enhancements, client integration, and … before long, support? Can I use my current network devices to simulate the functionality? Should I start looking for a new appliance – Network Attached Storage, perhaps? Following is a list of features I’ve enjoyed from WHS, and a little commentary on each.
File storage/sharing – this is the gateway, the first reason most people consider a server or some other kind of centralized storage device on their home network. It doesn’t take much experience with multiple client machines to realize that figuring out where you saved what and which is the latest version is a huge pain. Centralized file services can be achieved through various means nowadays, so I’m not really concerned about this one. Any NAS will do it, as will the big Windows 7 desktop I’ve got sitting downstairs with 2 TB of HDD space. If I were one of those silicone valley blogger-types, I could even achieve this through some kind of cloud storage service such as Google docs, Dropbox or Windows Skydrive. Of course, for the amount of storage I’m talking about I’d have to get a paid account, and if you’ve been paying attention, you know how I feel about recurring monthly payments for anything. Not to mention if my broadband connection goes away, so do all of my files.
PC Backups – This is a killer feature of WHS that I’ve made good use of. The server can take snapshots of your Windows PC’s every day, and, similar to Apple’s time machine/time capsule solution, keep incremental copies going back several months. Unlike Time Machine, however, the purpose is less focused on being able to retrieve single files and more focused on bringing back an entire computer in the case of a really bad event – like a hard drive failure. You basically boot the dead computer using a WHS restore disk, then you select the “version” of your computer you want to restore by date. It’s really useful when you muck your machines up as often as I do, and it’s a nice little security blanket to have in your back pocket. I’ve read that some of the NAS’s on the market have similar software bundled with them, however if I’m looking to do this on the cheap using my Win7 desktop downstairs, I’ll probably have to start relying on local shadow copies or manual image backups to a USB attacked drive.
Mac Backups – Thanks to this awesome post about doing time machine backups to a network drive, I’m not concerned about duplicating this feature. As long as I can map a network drive on my Macs, I’ll be able to back them up with Time Machine.
Windows Media Center recording archive – Microsoft did a nice thing when they developed a plugin for Windows Media Center that allowed for TV show archiving to WHS. I’ve used this feature a ton, and will lose it when WHS goes away. It’s too bad, too. The idea of having all of your media available in a centralized location is very appealing. Microsoft seems to be moving in a different direction, however. With Windows 7 homegroup, they make it appear as everything exists in as single library even if it is spread out over various computers within the same homegroup. It doesn’t do me a lot of good in a mixed environment, however.
Remote File Access – WHS allows for remote access to your files from anywhere on the Internet. In other words, if I’m working at a remote location and I need access to a file at home, I can hit a web-based file system and download any file from my server at home via that graphical interface. I can then make updates to that file locally, and upload the document back to my home server. I think many of the NAS’s allow for this type of access, also. However, if I use my Windows 7 desktop as a server, I may have to Remote Desktop into it to view/manipulate files remotely. I think this would be acceptable. It’ll take a little router finagling, but that’s usually one of my strong suits so I’m not especially worried.
Remote Desktop to Other Computers – Through the same interface described above, if there are Windows computers on your home network that are able to run the Remote Desktop service, you are able to RDP into all of those devices through the WHS remote web-page console. It’s a very cool feature in theory, but I have never used it. It’s kind of a niche feature. In order to take advantage of it you’d have to have multiple computers running either professional or ultimate versions of Windows, and are always on – not sleeping or hibernating (most likely desktops). Might make sense if you’re running a small business from your house, but most people use laptops that fall asleep as soon as the lids are closed. So, only mildly useful in my opinion. I can live without it.
Drive Extender – One of the coolest, most useful home networking innovations over the last 5 years is WHS drive extender. Unfortunately, due to various controversial reasons, Microsoft has decided to stop development of this technology and to not include it in future versions of the product, or any product for that matter. Drive extender allowed a server to “absorb” hard drives and appear as a single large drive. You could have 3 hard disks of different capacities, plus 2 USB external drives, also of different capacities, and they would all appear as a single, large server drive. Even better, you could add or remove drives at will and the “drive” would grow and shrink accordingly. To my knowledge, this type of technology doesn’t exist anywhere else and will be gone once the original WHS is end of support.
Offsite backup – This is a major weakness of WHS in it’s current incarnation. If your server is to be the central point of storage for all of your music, pictures, home videos, then it becomes absolutely vital that you find a way to backup your server offsite, in case something happens to your house. You want that type of data stored elsewhere so that it can be recovered if a catastrophe occurs. The most obvious way to do this would be to find an automated service that would back up your most critical data to the cloud, however, WHS just never seemed well positioned for this. Cloud backup providers typically have two types of services, one for home users – typically more reasonably priced – and one for businesses. Client software for the home users is almost exclusively written for client OS’s – Windows, OSX. Since WHS was built on top of Windows Server 2003, the software for home users doesn’t work on WHS. Thus, WHS users are stuck with the decision of whether to pay business grade prices (which could get very high, since some of the pricing models were per MB) for offsite data backup. I made due with Asus’ web storage solution since they had a WHS plugin developed, but I was never convinced that it worked very well. It literally took months to backup by video folders. I think I may be better off in this category by using my Windows 7 desktop, since I can use the home versions of Carbonite or Mozy for offsite backup.
Stream media – DLNA. They all do it now – Windows 7, NAS appliances. It’s a beautiful thing.
Robustness – This is a tough one. One thing that WHS has going for it is that it’s a tough little bugger. This is the upside of basing the code on Windows Server 2003. We typically lose power several times a year due to wind/ice storms (I know, I know UPS..) and I’ve never had trouble booting the server right back up. No blue screens. No freezes. It’s just solid that way. A NAS would probably be similarly robust. Windows 7 …. well, it’s not built to be a server.
Any suggestions on which way to go? I’ll probably start by trying to use my desktop, since that’s my cheapest option. I’ll be researching NAS, though. Sounds like there are some pretty good options emerging. Now, if only the cloud backup solutions would catch up!
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