Thoughts on Windows Home Server

This week I was lucky enough to acquire a brand new Acer h340 Windows Home Server at a great price. I quickly got it home and set it up and so far I am pretty impressed. I thought I would share my ideas here for those of you who are thinking about taking the step to a home server.

What Is Windows Home Server?

For those of you not informed, a Windows Home Server is a usually very small, headless (no Monitor, Keyboard or Mouse) server based on Windows Server 2003 technology, that allows all of your home computers to share in it’s storage and scheduling services. There is more to it, but that’s the basics, central file storage and backup.

Why Do I Need One?

Our home network is more complex than most. The basics are Comcast Cable Internet into a Netgear router, the router has an Xbox 360 hard wired to it, another three Xbox 360s connect to it wirelessly, along with a PS3, Wii, several laptops, an iMac, two Mac Pros and my Wife and son’s desktop PCs. There is an Ethernet cable that jumps to my office area and connects up the Windows Home Server, our Printer, one more iMac and my desktop PCs.

That’s a lot of machines. We are already pretty serious about backing up and most of the PCs, even the laptops, have external drives. All of our media is duplicated in a few places and most of my documents are duplicated as well as stored in the cloud on Windows Live Mesh.

The thing I was most excited about with the Windows Home Server was the ability to do system backups. Specifically ones I can do full restores from. The Macs that I use already have scripts that copy my important files to an external drive attached to my main PC desktop. Now they are also synced to the WHS (Windows Home Server.) This is a very convenient arrangement for me.

How Hard Is It To Set Up?

Surprisingly simple actually. I opened the box, plugged in an Ethernet cable and power, waited for it to boot up and installed the client software on my PC. There was a bit of updating at first, but I was only really required to enter a password I wanted to use and create accounts that match the login credentials that we all use at home. Once the client was installed and running the backups were automatically scheduled and I entered a Windows Live ID and picked a domain prefix for the remote site.

I did have one glitch in that uPNP did not configure my router so I had to open a few ports manually, but that was a piece of cake.

So What Does it DO?

The backup thing is obvious. What isn’t so obvious is that it’s an intelligent backup, so it doesn’t ever backup the same file twice, even if it finds it on different computers. It also treats storage space as a single pool, so adding drives doesn’t create new driver letters or complex raid configurations, it just extends the pool effortlessly and you have more space. The Server has 3 externally accessible bays to add up to 3TB of more storage to the included 1TB.

Beyond backups, it allows me remote access to my files, as well as directly to control my PC. I can use a Remote Desktop Connection and tunnel directly to any PC running the client and take physical control of the machine. That’s handy if you need to schedule a Media Center recording or anything that requires you to have your hands on the computer when you are away.

It’s a Media Server, naturally. Windows Media Center and Xbox 360s can connect to it effortlessly to stream Video, Photos and Audio directly to them anywhere on the network. That allows us to get our “My Name is Earl” fix anywhere in the house since the episodes are stored on the server.

Anything Else?

Yes! It’s totally extensible. There are Add-ins that allow you to add a myriad of functionality from cloud sync backup to remote viewing of web cameras. Just a quick search on Bing will show you dozens of plugins that add new functionality.

The really amazing thing is that these full blown servers start at about $350. Even the higher end ones reach to about $750. That’s an amazing value if you have multiple computers and value the protection of your data. The backup solution alone is like a Network Attached Storage device on steroids, everything else is just fluff.

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