Windows Home Server 2011 64-bit English 1pk DSP OEM System Builder DVD 10 Client Review

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Windows Home Server 2011 64-bit English 1pk DSP OEM System Builder DVD 10 Client ReviewI got this mainly for central storage of all my files. More and more I find myself staying in the living room with my family and just using my laptop then going off into the spare bedroom to use my desktop which held all my files. But I do work from both, so getting files between them is a pain.
A simple NAS could have fixed that problem, but while shopping for them I saw some that had some interesting features like being able to access files remotely through a web address. They were extremely limited in this functionality though and lots of people complained that it didn't work well. One company even charges you a yearly fee for this feature. This eventually led me to the HP boxes which worked well and had good reviews, but their price tag scared me. I learned they just ran WHS which I didn't even know existed, so I looked into building my own. This was about the time they announced the WHS 2011 beta so I decided to wait for that to be released so I could have the most current version.
I took an unused computer with a dual core AMD Athlon II processor and 8 GB of RAM, put in a 320 GB hard drive, two 1 TB hard drives, and a 750 GB hard drive.
Installation was effortless and really not much different than installing regular windows. I always build my own computers so I was familiar with the process.
It broke the 320 GB drive up into two drives, one at about 80 GB for the operating system and the other at about 200 GB for storage (the other three drives I connected after installation).
I was able to set up the two 1 TB drives in a mirroring configuration for redundancy by going into the disk manager, you are not able to do this from the main Dashboard application. I just thought I'd share that it is possible if you have a little know how or you can search google for videos showing you how to do it.
Setting up the web access was pretty easy actually and I'm glad to see it runs under an HTTPS connection for free with no certificate errors. Best of all, it can stream your media files. I set the quality to 'best' since I did have a full processor instead of the Intel Atom's the NAS boxes run and the server could transcode video files on the fly just fine. My camcorder uses H.264 in 720p HD which windows normally chokes badly on, but the streaming worked right out of the box with them. The quality is not original quality, far from it, but good enough and will let me easily share with family members without putting them up in places like facebook where who knows when their privacy policies will change.
Client backups are very handy. I have mine setup to do client backups once daily. It will store the last 7 days worth of backups, then the last 4 weekly backups, and the last 6 monthly backups. That means it keeps the last week worth of backups, for older time periods it will dump the older daily and just keep one for the week, then dump the older weekly and keep a monthly. It will do a full initial backup, then it just keeps track of what files have changed between backups, and adds those files the changed to the backup. That means you do not need your backup drive to be several times the size of your client computers.
The backups allow you to roll back a computer to any previous backup. Find out you downloaded a virus 3 months ago? You can roll your computer back to a monthly backup before that. You loose 3 months of changes, but better than loosing everything. Hard drive crashed? You can reload your computer to the previous day and it will be exactly like it was the day before the crash. All your files, all your programs, all your settings, everything.
I only came across two problems so far.
1) It automatically created shares on the 200 GB partition for things like Music, Documents, and Movies. The problem is I already had folders for this on my 1 TB drives that use to be in my desktop computer. There was no way to edit the path for these share folders that were automatically created. You can move them, but not point them to a different directory. The work around is to remove the shares, then recreate them with the existing folders. A bit of a pain, and again this couldn't be done entirely from the main Dashboard application. An alternative would be to move the folder to the drive you want it on, then copy all your files over manually into the new one.
If you are not trying to install drives that already contain data, but are merely going to centralize all your files on the server this won't be an issue for you. Just move the share folder to the drive you want it on, and then transfer all your files over the network.
2) In order to configure a server backup, it needs an entire hard drive, it can not be included with any other files and can not be a smaller partition of a larger drive. I had originally intended to break the 750 GB drive into two chunks. One for client backups, the other for a server OS backup. Unfortunately I can't do that. 750 GB is a bit extreme for the OS backup, which is only about 60 GB... so currently I'm only doing client backups and not doing the server backup. Hope that dosen't come back to bite me. Hopefully in a future service pack they'll add functionality to that feature to be more flexible. The motherboard I have this only only has four SATA ports so it's full. SATA controller cards are rather pricy so I haven't looked into buying one much.
To add to server backups, the default is actually to backup everything on the server, not just the OS. You can configure it though (easily) to only backup specific things. In my case I was going to just back up the WHS 2011 OS, and the client backups (backup of a backup? Sure why not!).
Overall I'm fairly happy with it. I do not have virus software on it because none officially support WHS 2011 yet (some have announced they are working on it). I'm not too worried though, I don't work directly on the server and any files that get transferred to it will first come from the client computers which all have virus scanners. Putting a virus scanner program on it would amount to scanning the files twice, once on the client and once on the server. Redundancy is not a bad thing though.
There are several add-ons you can download for it, for disk management, power management, media libraries, etc. I looked into the power management one called Lights Out, looks cool to suspend the server when not in use to conserve power. It's not free though, so I'm looking into seeing if I can do it manually, I don't need the server on all night when I'm sleeping and don't want to go down to the basement to turn it on/off every day.Windows Home Server 2011 64-bit English 1pk DSP OEM System Builder DVD 10 Client Overview

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