Windows Home Server 'Vail' to get more entertainment hooks

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Reliability has to be the first priority

I attended an evening session on WHS and as one of my friends who attended put it: it's not Windows Home Server, it's Windows Home Backup. Then he amended that to Windows Small Business Backup, because really, most homes just don't need this and in many ways, it's the wrong solution for backups.

Normally, I hate to present a Mac product in a Windows group, but Apple's TimeMachine solution is simply easier and better. You don't need a special server to manage your backups with it.

You can argue that WHS is more than just backups, but during the presentation backups was 95% of what was demoed or discussed. We barely got to see anything else and what they did show wasn't too exciting (or even as good at other free tools you can get from Microsoft itself).

That being said, I asked a real simple question: if I rip a drive out of the WHS server - can you be 100% sure your data won't be lost - and what's the ratio of available storage to real storage (ie: how efficient is the backup). The short answer was: well - no, it's not that reliable - you should get another drive as big as your storage pool and back your WHS system up periodically.

I pointed them at Data Robotics' Drobo and suggested that it would be as good for backups but would also be vastly more reliable.

The IIS and media stuff - interesting, but you can do that for free with Vista Home Premium (which ironically is cheaper) or WinXP Pro (which is even cheaper still).

So... I'm not sure who this is aimed at. It's a product I could kill with maybe a month's worth of development.

Posted by: TheWerewolf   Posted on: 02/25/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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