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Monday November 23, 2009 5:54 AM AEST
Skip Navigation LinksPC Authority > Features > Expert guide to Windows Home Server
Expert guide to Windows Home Server
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FEATURE

Expert guide to Windows Home Server

by Ross Burridge  on Mar 26, 2008
Tags: Windows | home | Server
3 comments in this discussion
"geller wrote: Home Server is cool, but who's going to go to that length for backups? Maybe if you're an SMB or home office, but i can't see many people bothering. What IS cool is MAc time ..."
By smadge1
 
For the most part, WHS runs as a headless device – no monitor, keyboard or mouse – and you won’t be able to connect these peripherals to some OEM devices. Instead, administration is carried out via the Home Server Console, either on a client machine or over a Remote Desktop connection to the server. The latter isn’t advised, however, for the simple reason that launching a Remote Desktop session brings up a warning as to the dangers of exploratory fiddling.

The first of the Console’s four tabs, Computers and Backup, lists the computers registered on the network, as well as their operating system (XP and Vista are supported) and their backup status. You can also view, start or administer manual and automatic system backups from here, or remove clients.

User Accounts provides control over creating new users, and their local and remote access credentials. Despite Microsoft’s fondness for such things, there’s no admin/restricted user paradigm, although there’s a guest account, which can be disabled.

The Shared Folders tab shows the space used by each folder, its duplication setting and its status – essentially whether the duplication has been successful. This is the place to create, delete or rename folders, as well as restrict permissions on a user-by-user basis. The nature of the disk structure means that using Windows Explorer to administer folders on WHS itself is fraught with pitfalls, unless you stick to the \\SERVER network path.

click to view full size image
WHS offers all the NAS features you'd expect, plus a lot more you wouldn't


You can also call up a history graph for each folder, plotting space used over time. Clicking on the Server Storage tab shows the physical hard disks installed, with their capacity and status, along with options to remove, add or repair any disks listed. A pie chart helpfully shows the space division between shared folders, backup and duplicated folders.
Copyright © 2009 Dennis Publishing
This article appeared in the April, 2008 issue of PC Authority.
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Comments: 3
Thoughts on this article? Add a comment below.
Invicta
Mar 29, 2008 12:24 AM
 Awesome feature, I have been considering setting up a home server for a while now. This sortof convinced me too =P


Comment made about the PC Authority article:
Expert guide to Windows Home Server?
Find out how Microsoft’s impressive new OS will share and back up all the data on your home PCs, among other tricks.

What do you think? Join the discussion.
geller
Mar 29, 2008 10:28 AM
 Home Server is cool, but who's going to go to that length for backups? Maybe if you're an SMB or home office, but i can't see many people bothering. What IS cool is MAc time Capsule - copy to portable hard drive (easy/cheap to buy, simple to use), incremental backup, and no need for separate machine.

And PlayStation 3, Xbox - these things are actually where the future lies in connecting your TV to your msuic, videos etc. not the PC \:d/ .
[size=9]It's your friend [/size]:
smadge1
Mar 29, 2008 5:19 PM
geller wrote:
Home Server is cool, but who's going to go to that length for backups? Maybe if you're an SMB or home office, but i can't see many people bothering. What IS cool is MAc time Capsule - copy to portable hard drive (easy/cheap to buy, simple to use), incremental backup, and no need for separate machine.

And PlayStation 3, Xbox - these things are actually where the future lies in connecting your TV to your msuic, videos etc. not the PC \:d/ .


I have been using WHS since RC1, and it's been great to finally implement a multi-pc backup solution, that I've never had before.

once you setup your server, you install an unobtrusive connector program on each client computer, and the backups are automatic.

it's really designed for people with 3 or more computers. A single computer is easy to manage backups, but what if your household has 10 PCs? Some households could even have 2 WHS boxes to share the load. (you can only connect up to 10 PCs to a WHS box)

The future of WHS lies in the media integration, being a new product, a lot of that functionality either doesn't exist or is just added on.

WHSv2 is expected out next year some time, no word yet on expected feature-set though.

If this OS sounds like something you could use, grab an eval copy and try it for yourself, it's a great OS.

And as far as HTPC goes, yes, I've been considering buying an XBOX 360 for this purpose. But the lack of a Blu-ray drive is a pain, I don't want an Xbox and a PS3.
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