Home Tech Lab: What’s so great about Windows Home Server?

I love Windows Home Server. It’s feature set is perfect for everything I need.

Backup all of my computers
Storage for my music and movie collections
User accounts to keep certain files protected from kids either accidently deleting them, or seeing them at all
Expandable storage space without limits
Reliability with simplicity

My history with Network Attached Storage

I’ve become quite a space hog on my home network. I’ve been collecting music for years. My collection is quite extensive. I’ve also been collections Movies and TV shows for a while now, and I like to keep the whole collection online and available to watch from any TV at any time without having to flip through the book of DVD’s (which I also have)

A couple of years ago, I started with an old computer and built a Network Attached Storage machine using FreeNAS, which is a free OS that you can just download and install, based on open-source software. It only had ~300g of storage across a pair of drives, and it served me well, for a little while. I became frustrated by it because it was loud (old computer with loud fans), ugly (again, an old box), and it used more electricity than I liked.

A bit later, I bought the D-Link DNS-323 dual Sata NAS enclosure. I love this little thing! It’s virtually silent, it powers down the drives when not being used, it’s tiny, and I’ve never had a hint of trouble from it. I’d say it’s only flaw is that it only has 2 drive bays. I started with one 500g drive, then added another one. Eventually, I replaced both of those drives with a pair of 1tb drives. The sad part here is that I had to take out two perfectly good 500g drives to install them. What do I do with those drives?

A case for doing Backups

I’ll tell you what I did with those drives. I used one to backup my desktop… for the first time ever. I’d never bothered to make a full and complete backup of my system because I’d never before had media large enough to do it. I did it this time just for kicks…

Then it happened… I had a data corruption that I couldn’t fix by hand. So, I reached into the backup drive, and restored some data. I’d never had that option before. It saved me literally hours of work. What was the data? Nothing important, really, it was the configuration files for one of my add-ons in World of Warcraft. Hahahaha, I know, right? But seriously, it would have taken me hours to reconfigure the addon. And I didn’t want to do it. So, having the backup saved me hours of headache.

Then I started thinking about it. What if it had been something important? How much important stuff do I have? I have my wedding photos stored digitally on the computer. I don’t know where the CD went that the photographer gave us. If I were to loose those, I might loose my wedding photos forever! I have photos of my son’s first soccer games. I have photos of my daughter’s gymnastics class. Those photos can NEVER EVER be replaced!

Then it hit me. The euphoric sensation that I had those photos now backed up. If my computer crashed again (I’ve lost whole hard drives before), I would NOT loose those photos.

I’m going to try to describe this “euphoric sensation” as best I can. David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done” describes a similar phenomenon. Your mind has a sort of mechanism built in that constantly refreshes thoughts and ideas that need to NOT be forgotten. Important things like “Pay the rent” and “Pick up the kids afterschool”. This refresh mechanism is called anxiety. Your mind won’t let you forget something that you are scared of forgetting. However, as David Allen describes - and as I have experienced first hand, there is an OFF switch to anxiety. It’s simple. Whatever it is, write it down and put it someplace that you KNOW you will be reminded when you need to. When you do this, the anxiety vanishes. Your mind can let go.

Having your files backed up brings a similar feeling of relaxation. When you know your data is safe, a part of your brain that you didn’t even know was active relaxes.

Back to Windows Home Server

So, how does Windows Home Server fit into this conversation? Simple. Windows Home Server perfectly fills all of the gaps in the story I just told you. It serves as a Network Attached Storage, but one that can expand with more hard drives. Compared to my 2-bay NAS box, there’s virtually no limit to how many hard drives I can connect to Windows Home Server. I wouldn’t have had to toss my 500g drives into a drawer, I could just add them back to the server.

On top of the file storage space, WHS does backup. And it does it in a way that really impresses me with it’s storage efficiency. Simply put, I’ve never seen a backup solution for multiple computers that works better than WHS. And when I combine these two ideas, WHS let’s me backup the file storage space using data duplication, but ONLY on the data that I want to duplicate. I could run a Raid 1 array on my NAS box, but I really only want to duplicate SOME of the data – because the rest of it is ALREADY backed up on my bookshelf. WHS lets me CHOOSE what gets duplicated.

Now, everything I have is backed up. All of my computers (six of them!) are backed up on the WHS. Most of the shared folders on WHS are all backed up by being duplicated across multiple physical drives within the WHS, and the ones that aren’t duplicated are already backed up on my bookshelf. I could shoot holes in any one of the hard drives in my house and not loose a single thing.