By and large, server products don't excite me; they are utility things, there because they have to be. I may be changing my mind though.

Over the last few weeks I've reorganised my servers, virtualising many of them and migrating my data to a new server; it was meant to be an old server, re-housed in a case big enough to take the 2 4-disk hot-swap drive bays, but the old motherboard didn’t fit so a new one was slotted in place. An afternoon of plumbing and an installation of Widows Home Server, and the new storage server is ready, and boy, is it a good product. Since the great disc disaster of ‘05, I’ve been paranoid about my data, keeping it in multiple places, and always hated the fact that you can have oodles of discs, but each is standalone. Unless you have a RAID controller, which I did, but failures were multiple. I was away. It was traumatic.

The great thing about WHS is that you don’t bother about RAID, it does it for you; it aggregates all of your discs and presents a single big volume with shares (a bit like drobo). You can specify whether files under those shares are duplicated, and WHS takes care of keeping multiple copies in case of a disc failure. Or if you want to increase your storage, you can replace a disc with a larger one. Access control is simple, nothing like the complexities of the domain model, but that’s a good thing for a home product, or even for a small business and I think Microsoft should push this to the small businesses as it’s ideal - easy to use, and fairly cheap; you can buy a ready installed server for a few hundred pounds and be up and running in an hour or so.

Easily expandable and safe storage isn’t the only benefit though, backups figure heavily too. On client machines you run the connector software and your client machine is added to the server; you then specify which drives to backup and that’s it; everything happens automatically. It even keeps backups back to 3 months (by default), and allows instant restore of entire client machines in case of disc failures. I still keep data locally (robocopying it to the WHS share nightly) and use Mozy for offsite backup, but I’m much happier knowing my machines are backed up and easily restorable.

Client integration is good too, with the server shares (Music, Photos, Videos) being automatically added to Win7’s libraries. Media Centre integrates too, so the same folders are made available

Anyone who’s got several Windows machines and wants centralised storage and backup should take a look into it.

Next step, installing DVDShrink and ripping my DVDs. There’s a MyMovies plugin for WHS, so I won’t even have to get up to play my favourite movies. Once the new PSU for my MCE box arrives of course. That was traumatic too.