Windows Home Server: One of Microsoft's Best-Kept Secrets

Windows Home Server came out a few years ago without much fanfare. It was almost like a product they developed in their spare time and did not put a lot of resources into making it, hense did not spend a lot of time or money to promote it. After all, it was based on Server 2003 which was already to market and the WHS was paired down a bit to be able to work in an environment of 10 or fewer machines. The price was one-third of Server 2003. I jumped on board marketing it to my dealer base right away. We sold a couple of dozen copies right away with several hardware sales to go a long with them. We had about a six-month lead on it before HP and others had their machines out there. The beauty of it was, it worked just as it was supposed to. Load the software on a machine with necessary hardware requirements, connect the clients and it made backups and kept them as it was told to. A little more work and you could access your files remotely from anywhere in the world.

I did set it up for a couple of clients and it was fairly easy. I have never had to do a restore from it, but friends have and they said it was flawless to put the old backed-up data and OS on a new drive.

What it does when set up with clients attached, is make a complete backup of the newly-attached clients. Then after that, it will make backups of just the data that has been changed, on an incremental scale.

It's intelligent enough to not save x amount of copies of a specific file. it will use pointers to indicate where a file is located, thus saving space on the hard drive.

They have come up with a few updates over the past couple of years, as well as lowered the price a bit to make it even more affordable. With most homes that have a computer actually having 2 or more, this product makes a lot of sense to use. It also makes the purchasing of a new, faster machine less troublesome, as the old machine can be made into a WHS machine for very little expense and the recycling aspect becomes a moot point.

A WHS machine, once set up and operational, does not need a mouse, keyboard or monitor, as anything you need to set or change can be done from a client machine that has a console icon to click to enter.

This icon also is color-coded to show the health of a system. If it's green, all is okay. If it's yellow, be cautious as something may not be correct. Red means there is an issue that needs attention quickly. So as long as you are not colorblind, you can drive a WHS machine very easily.

The current version being sold is Power Pack One. There are Power Packs Two and Three, which are downloaded through the Windows update mechanism. Basically, each one has some fixes and makes adjustments for the new Client software Microsoft has released, like Vista and Windows 7 and their 64-bit versions.

I recently had the experience of setting up the new version at a client's location. This was actually a small business that was located in the home. In all, there were 7 clients to attach to the WHS. We recycled his old Dell 3000 into a WHS with the addition of a 500g hard drive. The reason we had it was he had just purchased a new i5-661 system from me as his main machine. Let me tell you, it was great to hear him say, "Wow is that fast!" when he got his hands on it.

A couple of updates or caveats are necessary here. These are from my recent experiences and not my experiences of two years ago:

1) Windows Home Server really needs to be installed on the machine while that machine is hooked up to the router that it will used on. If you try to install the software and then bring to a location to hook up, the installation will fail and you will not be able to find the Home Server when you try to attach the clients.

2) The WHS machine needs to have a NIC that is supported by Server 2003. If you have any red X or yellow ! in the Device Manager, spend $15 for a new network interface card.

3) Make sure you do all the updates on the WHS machine. It will take a bunch of minutes but you want all the latest files.

4) Also make sure all updates are done to any machine you connect to the WHS--not just the critical updates, but the software and hardware ones also, which you can see from the Windows Custom Update button.

5) Make sure that you use the connector software from the WHS and not the disc that comes with the package. As the updates are done, new connector software is updated and placed on the WHS. If you don't, you may get some "wrong version" messages. I actually went to the WHS machine and copied the connector software to a flash drive and used the flash drive to transfer to the client machine desktops, and run the software from there.

6) I did have an issue which after several hours of frustration caused me to call Microsoft for technical help. Luckily, I did not have to pay for it and I know what to do from now on. The software and other folders on the WHS allow only the administrator to have access to the files. The Microsoft rep went in by easy access remote desktop and put the term "everyone" in the list and gave full permissions. When you log in from a client machine, usually the name is not "administrator". The bottom line was, I did not have permission to access the WHS software, and making that change gave me the permission needed.

7) Only one complete backup can be done at a time. So it may be necessary to leave all the machines on for several days till all the complete backups are done. Once one is done, you can manually start the next machine rather than waiting for the WHS to control it in the early morning (12 midnight to 6 am) which is the default setting.