2011-04-14

Windows Home Server 2011–How I use it

I recently added a Western Digital Hard disk with a new sector? size to my Windows Home Server 2003. Within a week it behaved very strangely. Afterwards I found out I had to set a jumper on the disk before using it in a pre-windows 7 machine.

So I installed a fresh Windows Home Server 2011, on my excellent Tranquil PC BBS. Installation went smooth and and I was up and running. I added the wifes laptop, my laptop, childrens laptop and the MCE to automatic backup.

I really don’t want to open any ports in my router, I dint think its worth the security risk. I think MS should have shipped at free remote service with WHS, that did the relaying. I have used Hamachi before but it is too slow and is unstable, unless some ports are open in the router. Now I use Remobo and works great and is very fast, its free unless you need to run it as a windows service. Installation was easy and it just works.

Currently the server sports a 2TB drive and a 1,5TB drive. In the old WHS Drive Extender made all the data available as a single 3,5TB unit, but the new WHS does not support this. Many have declare WHS dead because this feature was removed, but I don’t get it? I actually like the simple transparent way much better. I only have 2 media types that require TB’s of space and that is DVD rips, and Recorded TV. When I have too grow I just add a “Recorded TV 2” share and have my MCE point to that too, no one will notice.

I am a firm believer that most work should be done on the local machine and not over network. So the wifes documents and all the family pictures are stores on the wifes laptop. She sometimes delete files or removes text from documents. With WHS I only have a nightly backup, so I need something something to continuously backup files to the home server share. I ended up using AutoVer, its free automagically creates a copy of the file with a date extension. This cost some extra space, but it is worth it. Now I have all changes made to her files not just images every night.

For off-shore backup (you do keep you backup at another location right?) I use 2 e-sata enclosings with 1,5GB HDD’s in them. I keep one at home attached to the server and one at work locked up. Every monday pickup the one at home and swap it with the one at work. This kind of backup works great in case of fire, virus or hacker attacks since the disk is offline and at another location. With the old WHS I could mount the backup HDD in any other computer and see the files, but the new one hides the data in a unknown format. I like the old transparent way, now I have to use WHS to restore a file.

I have some critical data, the family pictures/videos about 60GB of it. So I asked on superuser how I should make a backup of those files to the cloud. The answer was a great product called CloudBerry Backup. Its optimized for S3 usage, so it does not use too much bandwidth or space. All files can be downloaded from Amazon S3 afterwards from any tool. Not like Mozy or the like where you are dependent their tools for restore. Cloudberry Backup offered a simple and transparent way of doing cloud backup. Installation and setup was silly easy, I set mine to run every night at 00 to 06 hours (It takes a few night to upload 60GB of data). I get a email report every day specifying total data, and how much was transferred. CloudBerry Backup just pickes up where it left the day before, even large files are uploaded in chunks so no bandwidth is wasted when it resumes the next night.

So there you have it, using a few extra tools I just made my WHS even more valuable too me.

1 comment:

srr037 said...

Morten, I'm doing a new WHS 2011 build and ran across your post. I'm interested in setting up a network with myself and my married children who access through the internet. Your remobo suggestion sounds like what I need. Can this be loaded on to the WHS operating system, or do I need to set it up in Windows 7. If Windows 7, how do I access the network within WHS? I'm just trying to figure out the steps I need to take to do what you suggested above.