I want to hear your stories!
This is an easy way to get a "Answered Post".
I would like to hear your stories about how Windows Home Server has saved the day! This doesn't just have to be disaster related, this can be about how simple and easy it is to use and now your wife is happy, or how Grandma can now see the kids pictures from events like Thanksgiving or soccer! I would just like to hear your amazing stories.
If you have run across them in the forums, you can even post a link to a story you have read or found previously. To go even further, you can even link to other peoples blogs or webpages. Please try and keep these hero stories!
Answers
I set up my dad as a user on my family's home server so he could see all of our pictures from last year. Once he got in, however, he noticed he had several hundred pictures of our kids he had taken that he had forgotten to give us. He simply added them and they showed up on our Vista Sidebar photo albums without us even knowing he had sent them!
We're big fans!
- I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and it works great. The backups are simply amazing.
I actually already took advantage of the restore process. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, all of the networking on my main PC became corrupted. After messing with it for about 2 hours, I just decided to roll back to my Thanksgiving morning backup (before all of the problems started happening). The restore took about 8 hrs, but when the system came back up everything was perfect.
It's a great system. I just upgraded to Gigabit, so hopefully that will help the speed issue. I'm still using the Release Candidate version, but the retail copy will be here by the end of the week.....
But I've had to use the restore function a few times... My Media Center PC seems to be highly suceptible to having issues, so I've had a couple of scenarios where either updates didn't install properly, or something happens and it just generally crashes every now and then, (Probably a failing HDD for the Primary drive)... But in a couple of scenarios where the system has been not bootable, I've been able to restore it back to an earlier point in time
However... I would like to point out that my Media Center PC is wireless, so in order for me to restore it I had to unplug it from behind the entertainment center, get it out of the entertainment center, carry it into another room, place it near the router, disconnect a network cable from my printer temporarily giving my Media Center PC a wired connection to run the connector software... Upon the completion of the restore I had to pick it up again, place it back into the entertainment center, and reconnect everything in the back again....
Beyond that though it works great...
The connector software needs to have a wireless client built into it...
Really for me Home Server is a solution. Both my wifes computer and mine run WinXP Home and for years she's been asking for a home network. Anyone with XP Home knows how difficult it is to do. I work in a data center all day and the last thing I want to do when I get home is administer my own network. When I got a chance to preview the CTP I was extremely happy. It took a few minutes to show my wife how to use it. Most of all she was happy that she had a network printer and extra storage space. Sure I could have accomplished this another way but MS really has provided a solution and that's what I needed.
I use WHS as a "hub" for pictures to/from my in-laws in China and my daughter serving in the Navy in Japan. It has worked flawlessly since day 1. They all like sharing pictures pretty much in real time.
Not me, but Geoff who was saved by WHS back in April 2007.
I stupidly opened an attachment on an email and all hell broke loose. It disabled my (Free Avast) Virus scanning software services, Shut down Windows defender , Stopped me accessing Services or Task manager then started to mimic the windows security service(Icon in Tray). I ran Windows Defender and it kept finding mallware, popups, dialers stuff everywhere. It was just replicating on each reboot all different stuff.
I tried everything but it was just getting worse. I have delt with virus's before but this was nuts! Still don't know what it was.
So i decided to take the plunge and restore the computer from a backup on my WHS. Popped in the CD ,formatted the disk, set up the restore and 1 and 1/2 hours later all is peaceful and back to the way it was just before the nightmare above.
Lessons learnt. Dont turn off UAC , Probably get a better virus scanner and don't open attachments on strange emails. Best of all this is awesome software from Microsoft. They will definetly be getting money from me when its released.Geoff.
PS: I do not need the green "Answered Post", I just wanted to share it with you all.
Here is one of my success stories I did a ways back. It "puts to the test" the Restore CD and it passed with flying colors.
Link:
http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1764608&SiteID=50
WHS's big success at my house is the fact that my wife person 'gets' it and doesn't complain about needing to add another drive when space gets low. It's the first piece of technology in the house since the TiVo that she is fully supportive of.
PGordini wrote: it just works.
Ok, I've got a story that's probably a little outside what you want... but this story has actually sold a couple of my friends on getting a WHS.
Windows Home Server saved me from my own stupidity...
Being that I think I'm quite the expert power-user, I proudly ignored all the warnings about not adminstering the WHS as if it were a Windows 2003 Server... I made a number of changes to the system and installed some software (including trying to force WMP 11 so I could share out additional media types to my Xbox). All seemed to go well for a while... but then a week later, the system stopped responding and I had to reboot it. Turned out that I had fubar'ed something so badly that it got stuck in an endless reboot cycle (safe mode/recover mode didn't help).
So how did WHS save the day? The WHS Server recovery really works! I popped in the DVD, ran the installer, and my WHS was back to normal (with just a few additional steps). All of my files and backups were still alive... I was absolutely blown away with how well the recovery worked on the server itself! And even failing that, the files really were available to browse via NTFS (assuming I couldn't get the server working again).
Having used other enterprise servers and backup systems, the biggest weakness tends to be in recovering the server itself. Many of them claim to have infrastructure to help you recover the server--but rarely have I seen them work as advertised.
The excellent work done in making the WHS reliable and easy to manage/recover/fix really paid off... I can think of only a few products that I've bought that actually work as advertised--WHS is one of them. My critical files were still there, the server is back to doing its job, and I narrowly averted sleeping on the couch for the rest of my life...
It's the greatest thing since sliced bread!!!
Nobody even knows it's there, it just works.
LightRoom automatically creates a backup for downloads to the workstation on the server
Photoshop defaults to the photos folder for saves
The kids have read permission on the photos folder from anywhere (two are away at college)
PC restore was a snap when the wifes Laptop went belly up
When the grandaughter trashes the setup on her laptop PC restore to the rescue
SynchToy keeps everybody's MyDocuments synched to the private folders on the server
As a print server anybody can print to either of our printers
All five wireless PCs get backed up every night with no intervention from anybody
All I need now is a good offsite backup solution
Using it to back up the kids computers while they are away at Uni. They keep all their valuable course work on their laptops and, being teenagers, have no conception of the danger of lost work!
It already has been used twice in anger to find and replace files that have been inadvertently deleted. It's now so popular, that I've built 8 servers for other families with kids and school!
It's also been used to rebuild a failed computer at home, which earned numerous brownie points.
Colin
ps. The downside, I installed a camera on it to watch the workshop where the servers live, however, it now means the Wife can check up far too easily.
Well, it has been a while since I have posted but I do have a good story.
I have been using WHS since early beta. I do love the product and it just "works". I recently got the OEM version from www.newegg.com along with my 5th 500GB drive. The upgrade from RC1 worked great, I just needed to update the client PC software on my 2 laptops, 3 desktops, and 1 Media center PC.
I have two kids, and they both share the PC in the playroom. My younger child love playing all the games my older child does. One of their favorates is Lego Starwars. My younger child being only 4 years old sometimes does not understand the whole save game idea and just watches what the 9yo does.
Well, I get home from work the other day and my 9yo is very upset, yelling at the 4yo that he has overwrote his savegame for Lego Starwars that he has been playing for months and has it 90% complete. Imagine his suprise when he went to go play and it said that the game was only 4% complete. He was very upset.
WHS to the rescue. I didn't even have to pop in a restore disk. I opened up the console, browsed the C:\ drive backup of the downstairs PC until I found the directory with the savegames then copied over the file from the backup.
Daddy had saved the day.
Granted, I did have to take away the computer from the 9yo for a week for yelling at his brother and saying a few nasty words that I did not know he knew, but I was the Hero that day.
And on a sidenote, I love being able to stream music, videos, and pictures to my PS3. We had some friends over last weekend and we were able to show all the pictures from our Thanksgiving Vacation to Disney wirelessly right to the Playstation 3. I can't wait for the next firmware for that thing so I can watch my colection of DivX movies.
I have a home built Home Theater PC (HTPC) that never worked well with XP and 3rd party software. So I built it back from the ground up with a new motherboard, 45W dual core processor, and more RAM. Installed Windows Vista Home Premium as the new OS to get multimedia. Family immediately knew how to use it and all was well until the primary and only drive started to not be found on boot intermittantly. So I removed the drive, put in a Raptor that I had lying around (ok, more heat but fast) and ran the System Restore CD from WHS. In a shorter time than reinstalling an OS and applications from scratch, the PC was back up and the family was once again enjoying their media.
The file sharing on WHS is also superior to a shared drive approach used before. And my wife has the peace of mind that we have a redundant backup solution.
The house is a much more peaceful place with our WHS solution.
- My daughter's PC had two hard drives in it, both nearly full. Since the PC case can only hold 2 drives, I bought a new 500GB drive for her birthday to replace the 40GB system disk. In the past when I had to rebuild a PC like this, it would have taken a full day to install Windows and all of the other applications she uses. So I was very grateful for the WHS PC restore that allowed me to format the new drive and restore the system disk with only about 10 minutes of my time. The PC was up and running in a few hours, and much of that time was spent formatting the new disk. She is thrilled with the amount of free space she has for photos and tunes, and I am very pleased with the time saved and the knowledge that the restore process will work for me when I need it.
Now, my next step is to take care of our extended family. My father-in-law, who lives in Ireland, has a laptop where he loads his digital photos, and the hard drive crashed back in June. He is in his 70s, is not very tech-savvy, and has some trouble learning and remembering complicated procedures like burning pictures to a CD-ROM. He lost hundreds of photos as a result of never backing anything up. I installed a new drive for him and got him up and running and he took the PC home after a recent visit. Now I can get him to upload his photos to my WHS and we can prevent a future loss. The upload process is easy for him to use, now we get to share the photos as well from 3000 miles away.
I've only had the server for about three weeks now, but it is already proving that it is well worth the price I paid for it. I was on my way from Colorado Springs to Denver to attend a Microsoft event when my wife called me and said her computer wouldn't boot. After some over-the-phone troubleshooting her computer wasn't finding the boot drive for her Vista desktop. I told her where the WHS recovery CD was and walked her through the process of performing her own recovery from the Home Server. She had it started before I went in to the event and it was finished by the time I got out. She was so proud of herself for doing her own recovery. That incident alone justified the purchase of the software, but there have been 4 other times that I have recovered computers with no loss of data due to the WHS.
I also have used Whiist to set up a shared photo album for all of the relatives to view. Everyone loves the ability to view or upload their own photos, especially since we are spread all over the US.
Hi guys n babes,
I have not been having any problems at all w/ WHS RTM. My 3- Vista HP restores worked great for my other beta testing.
Even tho i have a old clunker (Dell 4100 @ 1Ghz) the thing has proved to work just fine doing backups when i want & restores when i want too.
From Vista Ult. I uploaded 7.5GB of (.wma) music using the Shared Folders shortcut, that worked perfect too, playing them from the Shared Folders shortcut works perfecto, on any rig i want.
I love this OS & I plan on keeping it.
Hello,
I've been running WHS for right at a month now. The features that I like the most are backup and remote access.
I travel a lot and this week while I was on the road, one of my eBay auctions ended. I was able to log into my home desktop machine, confirm payment through office email, print a USPS shipping label to my office printer and have my wife ship the box. Showed a couple of my colleagues and they were mighty impressed.
If this weren't enough, the real exciting benefit to WHS is that my bald spot is starting to fill in with new hair!!
- I've been using WHS since the beta. I never really employed a backup solution before for my computers at home. Over the last year, however, I've used the restore feature several times simply because it was quicker and easier than figuring out what caused the problem and diagnosing it.
Loving it here... I'm in the military and currently deployed to Antarctica. To make the separation easier on my kids I started making them videos of various aspects of life "on the ice". The first one was just a quick hello so after compressing it with Movie Maker it was easily small enough to e-mail. All of the other videos I have made have been too large for e-mail so I started uploading them to the videos folder on the WHS. I was able to walk my wife through opening the shared folders by the link that the connector software had put on her desktop. Now that she knows where the videos are stored she can show them to the kids anytime. The kids really love it. My five year old daughter even talks to the computer while the videos are playing. They had a childrens book about penguins in the store so I bought it and recorded me reading it. I just uploaded it. Tomorrow night I will get to read my kids a bedtime story despite being on the other side of the planet. It may not be the biggest disaster I have recovered from using WHS, but it is the best thing I have used it for.
- And my most recent success story:
I've been testing Vista on a second bootable partition on my desktop workstation, and have finally decided that I'm going to use it as my primary OS. Problem was that the initial installation of Vista was on a relatively small partition on my RAID array, so in order to really use Vista I needed to move some partitions around. (The tool I use is Acronis Disk Director.) The bootable CD version of ADD doesn't include drivers for my RAID controller, so I have to do these things with the array online, rather than offline. Obviously, this is a dangerous thing to do...
To make a long story short, there were problems during the resize, which resulted in the partitions being correctly resized, but the Vista partition's MFT and alternate were hosed. Before WHS, this would have been a disaster (with a corrupt MFT, no files can be accessed). With WHS, it was a minor Saturday night speedbump. I tried repairing the OS, which left it still unable to boot. So I inserted the WHS Restore CD, plugged in my USB flash drive with drivers, and rebooted. I installed the drivers and started the restore, then my wife and I went to the movies. When I got back, the restore had finished (probably in about 20 minutes), so I removed the Restore CD and rebooted. Everything was back to where it had been when the backup ran the previous night.
WHS saved me from a fairly ugly Saturday night and Sunday rebuilding my workstation... Bought an OEM version of WHS. Popped it onto an new PC assembled for the purpose with a single 250 GB HDD. No problem installing it and setting everything up. Tonight added 2 new 250 GB HDD's for additional storage/backup. All went smoothly. WHS is making a significant contribution to managing our home network/data. Hoewever, early days and I'll be watching how this all unfolds. I still have a few wish-list items such as email and a bulletin board. Have read the threads re email and kind of agree with the reasons for not putting email into WHS (as much as I'd like to see it there).
I really, realy like WHS. Since I installed the OEM version a couple of months ago I think I have used every feature available from file restores, to system restore, to streaming music, movies, and photos to my Media Centre PC, to remote access and web page usage.
My WHS computer looks after 5 physical computers and 2 Virtual PCs.
I have received phone calls at my work from my kids and have been able to restore homework projects that the kids have lost by restoring the files from the most recent backup. I did this by using remote access to the homework computer from my desk at work and then running the restore. The kids know how to do this now so they can restore files without ringing me.
I decided to install another OS onto one of my home PCs, so I took a manual backup then installed the new OS. After a few days I decided I needed to go back to the other OS, so I used the restore CD and restored the PC back to the way it was before the OS install. Everything worked perfectly.
I lost a hard disk in the WHS computer. I had to start again with the backups, but because of duplication none of the files on the WHS were lost. The disk was replaced and things became healthy again. No big drama there.
I use several Add-ons like whiist and now have several web pages that can be accessed remotely, and thanks to the recent November update there are no certificate warnings.
Movies play seemelessly on my Media Centre PC streamed directly from the WHS computer, my music plays well.
I actually don't have a bad thing to say about it, great product.
My sister in Canada is doing a picture project for my parents and wanted me to sent her pictures, after some fooling around using WHiist I was able to get the photo album up and running and allow my sister to rummage through the pictures online. In addition to this since she is going through everyone's pictures to create a photo album she now also has the ability to upload pictures to be added to the album. Once I can prove that it works properly I'm going to let the rest of my family members how to upload pictures and let them all go to town...
It's like a personal add free picture book. Thanks to the Whiist add-in I actually plan to run a mini-website off my server once I get things tweaked and operational...
I wanted to upgrade a laptop from a 40 gig to an 80 gig har disk. I backed up the 40, installed the 80 and did a restore. I was back in business within a couple of hours.
Brian
This actually happened about 3 months ago...I logged into my computer and I was looking for a MS Word file with my thesis. I had completed quite a bit of work and I had several revisions done so far. I checked the desktop for the file and it wasn't there! I was wondering if I had the file somewhere else (on the server or a laptop I use for school), but the most recent version wasn't around! I turned off "Previous Versions" on vista so that wasn't a help.
Well, I knew that the server had the files backed up daily so I went to the server-backups to find the file. Apparently, I deleted the file by accident about 3 days before I was looking for it. I don't know how i deleted it (maybe my toddler deleted it?). Anyways, the backup had the latest version I was working on so I copied it from the backup and I only had to add the most recent updates to the thesis!
Thanks WHS Team!
my story started with the CTP program for WHS earlier this year, went on to RC and i just reinstalled it with OEM yesterday.
Originally i had a computer for home use and time goes, my wife and i moved to laptop and the desktop lies not use in. I turned on file sharing to store the data such as photos, files, etc. Image of the laptops are routinely made but management of these images is a big headache.
After installing WHS and moving all existing data to the WHS, management of the data is simplified and i no longer has to worry about moving data to new harddisk nor backing up of data.
My wife is going her Ph.D right now and her data is her lifeline. we used to use the desktop as a data store but keeping the data up to date is a problem constantly. With the WHS, she is now able to perform weekly backup of her laptop when she brings her laptop back from work. The true test of the WHS came in when she went over to france for a 7 weeks attachment. I backed up her laptop just before she left for france and towards the end of her attachment, the laptop suffered a harddisk failure. we are able to recover the laptop to the condition just before she left for france. the only thing lost will be the data collected in france and that will remain the shortfall and improvement that we will like to see. *note, she's currently using a Macbook running WinXP.
I also tried streaming picture and music to my PS3 which is connected to the network wirelessly. i am about to stream music smoothly. video not tested until PS3 supports DivX. the PS3 is about to detect the WHS without any settings done.
As for my upgrade part, i am about to test out a range of upgrade options, both recorded in the documentations and out of the documentations. i started with 2 SATA 80gb harddisk, added a 80gb PATA harddisk, change 1 to a 160gb SATA harddisk. I also did the extreme of pulling the 80gb pata harddisk out to simulate the failure of a harddisk and replace it with a 160gb harddisk. the replacement is easy but balancing takes forever and backup service stopped working after this stunt. lucky the machine was running RC and i was about to change it to OEM.
For my current OEM setup, i also tried something out of the books. Instead of doing a reinstallation, i choose the new installation option. before the new installation the RC machine has data located on the 160gb sata and 80 gb pata harddisk, storage balanced before i pull my stunt of taking out the 80gb harddisk. in theory, 1 copy of the data will be on either harddisk. for the new installation, i disconnect the 160gb harddisk and performed the installation. after the OEM machine is setup, i am about to connect the 160gb harddisk to the WHS using a SATA-USB adapter and restore them to their respective location. i also restore the computer backup data to the respective location. all that remains will be to add all other harddisk to the storage pool and let the balancing do its work. should all else fail, my data will still be in the 80gb PATA harddisk which i have disconnected earlier. i know its a little extreme but its really pushing the limit to the max. the data size tallies with the file size and this will really simulate emergency recovery of data
KS
Singapore
Joel, this may not be the typical story, but here goes.
As others have said, I do enjoy haveing the WHS and use it to share files with family in other parts of the country.
But, what I like best is being able to consolidate several servers (all using electricity) into one HP Media Smart appliance. I had a server running Server 2003 and I had the beta/rc WHS running on another computer. After purchasing the HP, I was able to move all of the data from the two other servers and retire them.
I am now backing up six computers in my home and moved all music and video data to the home server where it can be shared with the xbox 360s and the other computers in the house. Before, we had this content everywhere.
date: 16 dec 2007
time: 8:30am
i need my computer. my computer needs me.
last night, i surfed. not unusual for a saturday night.
not in this town anyway.
this morning, i drank coffee and tried to cover my tracks.
(no need to scare the children.)
unfortunately for me, the recent software upgrade to my favorite
internet debris eraser, did more than i bargained for.
i stepped away for a coffee refill only to return and find
(iolo system mechanic 7) had erased 20,000 files and wasn't
done yet. seems all my data, pictures and iTunes were considered
merely debris. so much for my taste in music.
my EMC Retrospect backup wasnt going to help me either.
the pacman sized glitch had seen to that.
it had been a victim too. it never stood a chance.
time to bring in the heavy artillery.
i slid the windows home server recovery cd into the holster,
put my Durangos on and sat back. i let that pony run
for 90 minutes.it never even broke a sweat.
and there i was, back to the future.
the 4am backup was restored and all that was left
for me to do was remove the offending software before
it could erase my disk. weird.
Not 2 days after receiving and setting up my HP MediaSmart Server EX470 I needed it to perform a full system restore on my primary desktop PC. The server had already done an initial full backup and one incremental since I'd installed it, which turned out to be very fortunate.
The full restore was needed after a failed update of my Vista Ultimate desktop to Vista SP1 RC1. Something misfired during the update and my system became very unstable. Rather than fool with uninstalling SP1 or trying a System Restore I decided a full system restore from my Windows Home Server would be the cleanest alternative. And besides, what an excellent reason to try the feature!
The full system restore was flawless, kudos to the MS development team for WHS and HP for the MediaSmart Server implementation! The only issue worthy of note is the time to complete the restore vs. using Vista's built-in "Complete PC backup" feature. Although quite a bit slower than Vista's built-in capability it was very easy to accomplish and worked flawlessly. The benefits of having choices of sequential backup instances to restore from offset the time impact IMHO.
And I must say, this is quite an attractive appliance sitting here next to my desk where I can see it clearly. No more worries about losing data (except for a catastrophy). There is a comforting "peace of mind" attitude now that we're up and running!
Thanks to all involved in bringing this server software and hardware to market! Both are very welcome in my home and blend beautifully into my technology suite!
Doug
Well I know that this has had to happen to all uf us so here it is. I had just put the trial ver of WHS on a dell poweredge 1420 server to kick it around and see if it was better to use for my home than the SBS i was using at the time.
Now comes the good part I had just purchased a HP Pavilion dv9205us laptop to replace the dell that had died. approx 3 months into playing with WHS my wifi card stop working and after trying all the things the person on the phone wanted me to do found that I was going to have to return the laptop to them for service. Not bad right? Well they tell you to make sure you have a backup of all your files before you send them the computer and they mean it.
When I recived my laptop back from the with the working wifi card I also had a system that was back to the way it was when I first purchased it and I mean purchased it. No account on it nothing but the system is starting vista for the first time so lets set me up to run for you ough!
Well I had back up the system with the hard wire network card the day that I had ship it out to them so I thought this would be the test of all test for WHS to prove its claims put in the restore cd and reboot the laptop. about 30 mins later BAM system is right where it was before shiping to HP. and with the working wifi card.
well I was so impressed with the out come that my wife ask me what I wanted for Xmas this year so I told her the HP mediasmart home server running the full ver of WHS no time bomb , well she sas to me how much we do have 4 kids to get gifts for too. I tell her 750.00 and no payments for 90 days from hpstore.
She tells me ok get it but thats going to be your big gift this year, I tell her that it can be my only gift this year if she wants, reason I just purchased a laptop for her and I know that one of these nights she is going to tell me some thing is not right with it and If I have the latest back up for it i just saved myself a ton of work. but I did not tell her that or that she has a laptop under the tree to play with.
BTW I purchased the EX475 with the 1TB option installed so next xmas I can get her to get me the HDD to make it 2TB.
the unit came in on the 18th and she let me play with it right away so its up and running as I type this and working fine. put the box under the tree so that it looks good.
Mark
- I have been using WHS since the Beta days and when the OEM was available from NewEgg I jump at the chance and got it. So we have been using to store family photos and our music library via Firefly. This is great product. Just recently I did the ultimate test of using the Restore CD on my work laptop. There was something that I had installed (MS Virtual PC 2007 or Powershell) caused my system to BSOD after about 15 minutes running via my VPN client. So I backed up a few critical data files that I changed that day and put the Restore CD in, booted up the laptop and proceeded to restore the system using the previous nights backup. After about an hour or so, I went and watched tv while this was running, I was back in business. This definitely saved me time in rebuilding the laptop, without WHS it would have been 8 hours of rebuilding the OS and reinstalling all of my applications. This has to be one of Microsoft's best products that have come down the line.
Like others, I also had a very easy time setting up WHS and it "just works". Luckily, I haven't had a data loss tragedy for WHS to save the day, but I do have a good story related to WHS.
After getting WHS set up configuring the various PCs (Vista and XP Pro) in the house for back-ups and remote access, I decided to try out WHIIST to share photo albums more easily with my family. I put up a good sampling of pictures from our 2 most recent vacations with zero coding, once again "it just worked". I sent an email out to my family and the response was great. What was even better was when my dad asked if he could also post photo albums on my WHS box. I set up a new website for him through WHIIST and added an account for him all through the WHS Console. I gave my dad the simple instructions for connecting and uploading files to his website. He then made it his mission to put as many photos as he could on the site. Every third day or so, I'd check on his progress. One of those times yielded a great discovery for me. My dad had put up an early childhood photo including himself, his brother and his uncle. I never knew his uncle, but looking at the picture, I could have sworn it was my own brother Clay. They looked nearly identical. I never knew that tidbit about my own family and it took WHS to enable me to find out.
--Gordon
I've got one from beta that made up my mind about buying it as soon as it came out.
I had recently upgraded to Windows Vista Business on my laptop and was putting things back onto it as I had chose to do a reinstall. About a month went by when i realized my bluetooth drivers were not installed. I tried to get them via windows update but they were not on there yet so I had to install them by hand. I looked online and thought I had found them so I installed them and it was only after I restarted that they were not right! Windows would allways crash on bootup and rather than fiddle around in safe mode to uninstall them I just poped in my WHS restore disk and 40minutes later I had successfully restored my previous nights backup. Found the right drivers and I was good to go!I was screwing around with my machine today and overclocked just a tad too much. The system bsod'd and after a re-boot I got the %windows%system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupted message. I have an old copy of Norton Ghost and have it set to image the drive weekly. I put the Ghost cd in the cd drive as I have done many times, but it would only boot to PC DOS instead of starting the recovery environment. After contacting Symantec and being told that Ghost 9 wasn't supported anymore (and if I were to upgrade to version 12, the current backups would not work), I put the WHS Home PC Restore CD in the tray and I was up and running about 15 minutes later.
WHS worked like a charm. Not to mention it is much faster than my old Ghost solution.
I have a home brew WHS system. It is running on an old Asus A7N8X-VM motherboard, Athlon XP 2800+ processor, 1 gig memory, a Seagate 500 gig and a Seagate 120 gig hard drive, a 500 watt Antec psu, and a D-Link gigabit lan card. The lan card helped my data throughput even though it is bottlenecked through the pci bus.
I highly recommend WHS to anyone who screws around with their system like I do!
Randall Davis
My story is pretty simple, but here goes. Been using WHS since beta, now have retail copy. 5 pc's besides the WHS in the house.
My main computer, an Athlon 64 FX60 2GB box with Vista Ultimate is getting flakey. About 3 weeks ago, trying to uninstall one antispyware/antivirus package and install another, my computer was pretty screwed up. After uninstalling one and doing all the things recommended on the vendors web site regarding being sure directories were deleted and all, I went to install the other one. BSOD during the install!! Whew. Rebooting, trying again, same thing. Rebooting, no uninstall choice for the new one. What to do? Finally, on the third attempt to install, it did it. Now I had an uninstall choice. But, the new one was giving Vista Security Center warnings about no AV/AS. Tried to uninstall. BSOD during uninstall. Tried a Vista Restore Point, wouldn't do it, went thru the act, but on reboot, it said it failed. Tried a couple restore points, wouldn't restore!! Whoa, getting scarier by the minute. Well, I think, time to try a real life restore with WHS. Pretty freaked even though I had a pretty much unusable OS, so I went to local BB and got a new 320 gig SATA HD, plugged it into SATA 1 on the MB where the previous OS was booting from, it on a 250 GB. Ran WHS restore CD, 50 minutes later, back going with only the clock not set right!! Whew, one happy guy here.
Since this time, all in the last two weeks, what with a flakey installed OS seeming like it's getting worse, I've done 4 complete reinstalls back and forth on 2 hard drives and every one has worked flawlessly!! I even tried the AV/AS uninstall/uninstall again with the same result, sucker that I am!! Moving on with old AV/AS and restored OS.
This computer, the flakey one, WON'T boot the Windows Ultimate retail DVD, thinking I'd do a new install on the same hardware, like Vista wasn't supposed to need. I've tried setting DVD/CD drives to master/slave, using CS both ways, CD master, DVD master, put them on both IDE controllers on motherboard, tried the DVD drive alone, and tried 3 different DVD drives. I booted the DVD on 3 other computers, so it's NOT the disk. It will NOT boot the DVD on this ONE COMPUTER. It runs the grey bar, then the Green Microsoft Corporation scroller, then the drive stops spinning and then the screen goes black and that's that.
OK, ordered a bunch of hardware to build a new computer, no problem. Awaiting the parade of FedEX/UPS trucks.
I do have one question, and perhaps if I don't get a reply here, sort of off topic, I'll post a new topic!! I built my WHS on sort of old hardware, Athlon XP 3000+, IDE hard drives, 3 totaling 650 GB, 1 GB of RAM. I'd like to build a better box, newer motherboard, newer RAM, SATA hard drives now that I see how useful this Home Server thing really IS. But, will I be able to install my WHS OEM copy on new hardware, or am I screwed and have to buy again? I would NOT use 2 WHS boxes but replace one with the other. I could claim the old motherboard died, with a clean conscience, but what's the rule on this?
I swore off anything to do with desktop PCs back in 2002, so I had to start fresh back in 2/07 when I was accepted into WHS beta program. Now with 10 drives, extra ram and tv tuner card later....
Like many here, backups saved me once about 10 months ago, and I do love this feature. But I love the all in one solution of WHS that brings the past, present and future all together in one box. one of the first thing I did was to move all my VHS, Beta, mini and DV home movie tapes that we've had for the past 20 plus years to DVD format and Reel to Reel tapes (remember those?) to mp3 format all into WHS box It was an amazing experience seeing these again, especially because some we didn't even know existed. Although I've kept tape players in storage becuase of our home movies and music, it must have been almost 30 years since I've had a reel to reel player hooked up, 15 years for beta tape player and at least 4 years for VHS player. Seriously, how often do you watch those home videos on tapes or hook up camcorders to tv to watch them, but now that it's in WHS, it's only a few clicks away from showing my 18 year old when he took his first steps. My next project is to scan in our entire photo collection to store in WHS. I could have moved all these tapes to DVD a while back, but that wasn't the solution I was looking for.Not totally satisfied with using the WHS for what it was primarily intended for, I've recently added a tv tuner card and discovered a whole new use for the WHS box. Just love this box! In addition to performing its normal duties, it is now feeding live and recorded tv programs and FM radio streams to our laptops from anywhere in the house. It's brought a whole new meaning to the term, "Couch Potato." One more thing I'll be doing in the next few weeks will be to add a media extender to connect the server to my widescreen TV.
Yeah, WHS backup saved me once, but it has done a quite bit more for us since then. I'm just wondering what more WHS can do for me and am looking forward to the 2.0 release.
I had to use the restore my laptop the other night (partition table went whacky – BIOS said it couldn’t find a boot device). I went looking for the PP1 Restore CD, and found that only the readme.txt existed. I then downloaded the Dual-Boot Restore ISO, burned a copy, and proceeded to initiate a restore. Once I figured out that ANY other WHS activity on my home-built box generated network timeout errors and stopped them, the restore proceeded smoothly.
The only difficulty I had was the need to partition the HD using the Partition Management tool included. It seems to me that the best scenario would be for the Restore CD to automagically partition and format the drives with the same partition sizes that the backup bits know about. It was relatively easy for me to figure it out, but put the same situation into my daughter’s or my dad’s hands and they’ll never discover the problem or its resolution. The worst difficulty I encountered was that WHS lists the partition sizes in the backups using GB while the Partition Management tool uses MB. And each seems to calculate the size of a byte differently! Guessing the appropriate sizes after midnight just doesn't work for my old brain.
I also love the ability to remote into my home network from anywhere:
Need a file while I'm away from home? No problem. Just go grab it.
Want to ensure that my daughter's laptop got backed up while she was home from college? Just check from the web.
Don't have time to install the latest WHS add-in because of all those evening appointments? Do it remotely during lunchtime.
Want to check the logs and see what websites that homeschooled adolescent son has been surfing while I'm at work? Just remote in and look.
Recently my ISP changed authentication methods for POP3 email service. I can no longer reply to email unless I'm directly connected to my ISP. (e.g. I can read email at the local Tully's Coffeeshop but can't reply until I get home.) With WHS I can remote into one of my home computers from the web and send and receive email just as if I was sitting at home.
I gotta say WHS rocks!
- I have had an interest in computers and programming since 16K RAM was state of the art for home computers. Imagine using your cassette recorder as "drive".....
When my oldest daughter lost the memories from her 9th school-year due to a blue-screen situation in combination with the manufacturer's poor re-installation configuration, I realised that something had to be done. I started making CD backups every month. Then MP3s and digital photos began filling up the drives and even DVDs weren't enough for backup. Extra drives were installed. A SAN was purchased including a great back-up software but it still needed manual attention to make sure it did what it was supposed to.
When I first heard of WHS I couldn't wait until the day I was going to get it.It seemed to have everything we needed. Then one day it was available through a net-shop. Yeah! I ordered it and purchased the hardware. On a cold and rainy Xmas holiday evening, me and my youngest daughter built our server from a Gigabyte mobo (integrated graphics), Intel 2140 CPU, 4 x 1GB RAM and 2 x 500GB drives. And it worked. We installed the WHS OS and it worked. Then we installed the connector SW and it ... didn't work :-( . We tried everything and finally it came clear that it was a matter of client firewall settings. But we had three different ones. And it also took some time to realise that the Compaq Evo 310 didn't like being connected to the switch; had to be the router.
Nevertheless, ever since, it has been like a dream. Pictures, music and videos available for everyone from one source. Backups are made auto-magically and if the clients are not reachable during night, I realised that just switching them on during breakfast does the job. It really calmed the nerves of the family IT mgr. And all of a sudden all members of the family understood what computers and networks is all about....
We do not regret one milli-sec investing in this! - Here is one from this post:
http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2831881&SiteID=50
A couple days ago I spent many long hours working on something that I considered critical enough that I was saving changes to my pc and to a public share on another computer as well as having autosave every hour on the application.
Somehow I lost both copies of the file, which I still don't understand (it was to do having the files open on two client machines and both saved copies as well at the same time in different windows). It was an open source application that I just started using last week. When I say "lost" the file was there but all the data was in in blank new document state.
I had left this application open overnight during the backup to WHS as well as another automated windows backup to a different machine.
So I figured no big deal I will just go to the backups and recover the file. First I go to my other backup and try to recover the file. Sure enough it is there but it is a version from about 1/2 way through the day???? Hmmm turns out I had been saving only to my public share copy later in the day(My bad) and that was wiped out as well and of course no backup for that.
Sugar, sugar, sugar...what to do now????????
So I go and load up the backup on WHS. Sure enough the same version of the file as was stored under my other backup of my documents. So it is also missing the last 8 hours of work late into the night.
I had also saved this application as an Html before I went to bed and that was all there but I could not get it back into the source application that generated the Html.
So I go to the reading room and ponder what to do. I get thinking that the program was running and where the heck is the autosave going. So I look it up and sure enough it saves it to an application directory under documents and settings.
I check the autosave directory and the autosave versions are now gone as I had closed the documents and application which clears out the files.
Of course on my none WHS backup I strictly backup "My Documents" which does not include the application settings under my user.(NOTE TO SELF: Change that automated backup).
So I go back into the WHS backup and go into the applications settings, and staring up at me like beautiful jewels, are my application files saved hourly by the autosave all nice and intact!
I copy the latest autosave version back into my application and Bob's your uncle I am back in business..
WOOOOOOO WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
I am a happy camper!!!!!!!! - I nuked a couple workstations with a delete command in the windows directory, dumped the MFT, ditched the partition, basically did cruel and unspeakable things to Windows workstations
that would have taken me hours to manually recover from, if at all.
Boot CD. Restore. 10 minutes. Done. I can't do anything in software to break workstations anymore, so that is a pretty big deal for me. I read in the WHS Forums of all the problems and complaints and I too have some problems with Windows Home Server, but I would like to Send Some Flowers. I have been using WHS since the first Beta was released to CPT. I really like the WHS Backup Concept and I’m glad they went ahead and released it early to get input from real life hands on Beta testers. I was trying to keep 5 Computers backed up using Volume Images; It was Driving Me Crazy and Costing Me an Arm and a Leg buying larger hard drives to store the images. DVD’s wasn’t even practical for archiving ~ 250 – 350 gb of data. I say again “It Was Driving Me Crazy” Just think about all that data in just ~ 150 gb and it all runs unattended overnight. For all those that complain – all they have to do is access and watch the WHS Forums, Blogs, Connect, MSDN, TechNet and Knowledge Base, etc. to get information and solve their problems. Restore is quick and easy, so much so that I have started using Backup then turning the backup off to Archive Old Volume Configurations that I want to save for future restores if needed. Just like the same concept that is used for Virtual Machine Configurations. I can restore a Saved Basic OPS in just a few minutes. Also the ease and advantage of Shared Folders for me and others; and also Remote Access when I am away from Home. I have an advantage over most others, in that I have ~50 years of experience with computer systems and have been able to work out most of my problems, but I am glad the Microsoft WHS Team Released the Product and didn’t sit on it! I know that the WHS Development Team is Peddling As Fast As They Can to make Windows Home Server a Stable Software Solution. I have worked on OPS Systems that after ~6-7 years, Bugs Have Crawled Out of It. I have a problem Posted Now http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2598836&SiteID=50 - That I am asking for help to solve, but having Windows Home Server to use is Much Better Than Not Having It. I am sure in the future we will find many more ways to use this product! - - - Regards - Shorto
Joel, I bought the HP EX-470 for use as a file server and it's fantastic. Aside from my own lack of knowledge with routers, I have not had one problem. I realize it's not intended to be used as a file server, but anyone looking for a FAST access file server, with remote access capabilities, that also backs up network workstations, it's awsome. I'm using it as a single drive server until MS gets the corruption problem handled. There is zero latency.
Some day I may look at using it for some of the 'fun' stuff, but for now, it's a great little file server.
Dick Day
Well, after months of using my home-built home server for nightly backups, media streaming, and serving a couple of web sites, (all very stable and smooth) I finally had the occassion to use the restore functionality.
I back up my work laptop along with my various home computers. At work we use Exchange for email. Recently I realized that I was missing about a two-month block of email, which for some in the software business is nothing short of critical. I don't understand how they were lost, but I'd suspect it (as much as I hate to admit it) that it was user error, probably during one of my manual archiving procedures.
So apparenlty my IT department doesn't have a mechanism to regularly backup our email (which I still find hard to believe given SOX compliance these days), so I was on my own. After a little thought it occurred to me that at some point in time these emails were likely contained in my laptop's local Outlook OST file. Sure enough, after browsing through various backup points and looking through the OST files I found my lost emails. I opened the file in Outlook, exported it to a PST file and voila, my two months of emails have been happily restored and integrated back into my email system.
I love it when a good backup system pulls through in a dire situation!
Aaron
Man, that exact thing happened to me. However, I had to replay/open all those darn Lego StarWars levels again by myself. It took a whole weekend. I am installing my WHS tonight, after figuring out how to get it running on an old dell poweredge 2500.
Funny story though, I can definitely relate.
Friday night I went to my kids’ school auction. My wife was the auction chair and was also responsible for publishing the catalog of items up for auction. About 2 weeks ago she was up late working on the catalog when about midnight her machine just flat out died. I tried to revive it but to no avail. We installed InDesign on my kids’ computer, logged into our home server, fished out the catalog doc, and away she went. It took about as long as it takes to install InDesign. We were even more fortunate that our backup window had picked up her machine in such a way that she barely lost any work.
The auction went great. Thanks to Windows Home Server, my kids will have text books next year J
Jay
All Replies
I set up my dad as a user on my family's home server so he could see all of our pictures from last year. Once he got in, however, he noticed he had several hundred pictures of our kids he had taken that he had forgotten to give us. He simply added them and they showed up on our Vista Sidebar photo albums without us even knowing he had sent them!
We're big fans!
- I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and it works great. The backups are simply amazing.
I actually already took advantage of the restore process. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, all of the networking on my main PC became corrupted. After messing with it for about 2 hours, I just decided to roll back to my Thanksgiving morning backup (before all of the problems started happening). The restore took about 8 hrs, but when the system came back up everything was perfect.
It's a great system. I just upgraded to Gigabit, so hopefully that will help the speed issue. I'm still using the Release Candidate version, but the retail copy will be here by the end of the week.....
But I've had to use the restore function a few times... My Media Center PC seems to be highly suceptible to having issues, so I've had a couple of scenarios where either updates didn't install properly, or something happens and it just generally crashes every now and then, (Probably a failing HDD for the Primary drive)... But in a couple of scenarios where the system has been not bootable, I've been able to restore it back to an earlier point in time
However... I would like to point out that my Media Center PC is wireless, so in order for me to restore it I had to unplug it from behind the entertainment center, get it out of the entertainment center, carry it into another room, place it near the router, disconnect a network cable from my printer temporarily giving my Media Center PC a wired connection to run the connector software... Upon the completion of the restore I had to pick it up again, place it back into the entertainment center, and reconnect everything in the back again....
Beyond that though it works great...
The connector software needs to have a wireless client built into it...
Really for me Home Server is a solution. Both my wifes computer and mine run WinXP Home and for years she's been asking for a home network. Anyone with XP Home knows how difficult it is to do. I work in a data center all day and the last thing I want to do when I get home is administer my own network. When I got a chance to preview the CTP I was extremely happy. It took a few minutes to show my wife how to use it. Most of all she was happy that she had a network printer and extra storage space. Sure I could have accomplished this another way but MS really has provided a solution and that's what I needed.
I use WHS as a "hub" for pictures to/from my in-laws in China and my daughter serving in the Navy in Japan. It has worked flawlessly since day 1. They all like sharing pictures pretty much in real time.
Not me, but Geoff who was saved by WHS back in April 2007.
I stupidly opened an attachment on an email and all hell broke loose. It disabled my (Free Avast) Virus scanning software services, Shut down Windows defender , Stopped me accessing Services or Task manager then started to mimic the windows security service(Icon in Tray). I ran Windows Defender and it kept finding mallware, popups, dialers stuff everywhere. It was just replicating on each reboot all different stuff.
I tried everything but it was just getting worse. I have delt with virus's before but this was nuts! Still don't know what it was.
So i decided to take the plunge and restore the computer from a backup on my WHS. Popped in the CD ,formatted the disk, set up the restore and 1 and 1/2 hours later all is peaceful and back to the way it was just before the nightmare above.
Lessons learnt. Dont turn off UAC , Probably get a better virus scanner and don't open attachments on strange emails. Best of all this is awesome software from Microsoft. They will definetly be getting money from me when its released.Geoff.
PS: I do not need the green "Answered Post", I just wanted to share it with you all.
Here is one of my success stories I did a ways back. It "puts to the test" the Restore CD and it passed with flying colors.
Link:
http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1764608&SiteID=50
WHS's big success at my house is the fact that my wife person 'gets' it and doesn't complain about needing to add another drive when space gets low. It's the first piece of technology in the house since the TiVo that she is fully supportive of.
PGordini wrote: it just works.
Ok, I've got a story that's probably a little outside what you want... but this story has actually sold a couple of my friends on getting a WHS.
Windows Home Server saved me from my own stupidity...
Being that I think I'm quite the expert power-user, I proudly ignored all the warnings about not adminstering the WHS as if it were a Windows 2003 Server... I made a number of changes to the system and installed some software (including trying to force WMP 11 so I could share out additional media types to my Xbox). All seemed to go well for a while... but then a week later, the system stopped responding and I had to reboot it. Turned out that I had fubar'ed something so badly that it got stuck in an endless reboot cycle (safe mode/recover mode didn't help).
So how did WHS save the day? The WHS Server recovery really works! I popped in the DVD, ran the installer, and my WHS was back to normal (with just a few additional steps). All of my files and backups were still alive... I was absolutely blown away with how well the recovery worked on the server itself! And even failing that, the files really were available to browse via NTFS (assuming I couldn't get the server working again).
Having used other enterprise servers and backup systems, the biggest weakness tends to be in recovering the server itself. Many of them claim to have infrastructure to help you recover the server--but rarely have I seen them work as advertised.
The excellent work done in making the WHS reliable and easy to manage/recover/fix really paid off... I can think of only a few products that I've bought that actually work as advertised--WHS is one of them. My critical files were still there, the server is back to doing its job, and I narrowly averted sleeping on the couch for the rest of my life...
It's the greatest thing since sliced bread!!!
Nobody even knows it's there, it just works.
LightRoom automatically creates a backup for downloads to the workstation on the server
Photoshop defaults to the photos folder for saves
The kids have read permission on the photos folder from anywhere (two are away at college)
PC restore was a snap when the wifes Laptop went belly up
When the grandaughter trashes the setup on her laptop PC restore to the rescue
SynchToy keeps everybody's MyDocuments synched to the private folders on the server
As a print server anybody can print to either of our printers
All five wireless PCs get backed up every night with no intervention from anybody
All I need now is a good offsite backup solution
Using it to back up the kids computers while they are away at Uni. They keep all their valuable course work on their laptops and, being teenagers, have no conception of the danger of lost work!
It already has been used twice in anger to find and replace files that have been inadvertently deleted. It's now so popular, that I've built 8 servers for other families with kids and school!
It's also been used to rebuild a failed computer at home, which earned numerous brownie points.
Colin
ps. The downside, I installed a camera on it to watch the workshop where the servers live, however, it now means the Wife can check up far too easily.
Well, it has been a while since I have posted but I do have a good story.
I have been using WHS since early beta. I do love the product and it just "works". I recently got the OEM version from www.newegg.com along with my 5th 500GB drive. The upgrade from RC1 worked great, I just needed to update the client PC software on my 2 laptops, 3 desktops, and 1 Media center PC.
I have two kids, and they both share the PC in the playroom. My younger child love playing all the games my older child does. One of their favorates is Lego Starwars. My younger child being only 4 years old sometimes does not understand the whole save game idea and just watches what the 9yo does.
Well, I get home from work the other day and my 9yo is very upset, yelling at the 4yo that he has overwrote his savegame for Lego Starwars that he has been playing for months and has it 90% complete. Imagine his suprise when he went to go play and it said that the game was only 4% complete. He was very upset.
WHS to the rescue. I didn't even have to pop in a restore disk. I opened up the console, browsed the C:\ drive backup of the downstairs PC until I found the directory with the savegames then copied over the file from the backup.
Daddy had saved the day.
Granted, I did have to take away the computer from the 9yo for a week for yelling at his brother and saying a few nasty words that I did not know he knew, but I was the Hero that day.
And on a sidenote, I love being able to stream music, videos, and pictures to my PS3. We had some friends over last weekend and we were able to show all the pictures from our Thanksgiving Vacation to Disney wirelessly right to the Playstation 3. I can't wait for the next firmware for that thing so I can watch my colection of DivX movies.
Pugsly0014 wrote: Well, it has been a while since I have posted but I do have a good story.
I have been using WHS since early beta. I do love the product and it just "works". I recently got the OEM version from www.newegg.com along with my 5th 500GB drive. The upgrade from RC1 worked great, I just needed to update the client PC software on my 2 laptops, 3 desktops, and 1 Media center PC.
I have two kids, and they both share the PC in the playroom. My younger child love playing all the games my older child does. One of their favorates is Lego Starwars. My younger child being only 4 years old sometimes does not understand the whole save game idea and just watches what the 9yo does.
Well, I get home from work the other day and my 9yo is very upset, yelling at the 4yo that he has overwrote his savegame for Lego Starwars that he has been playing for months and has it 90% complete. Imagine his suprise when he went to go play and it said that the game was only 4% complete. He was very upset.
WHS to the rescue. I didn't even have to pop in a restore disk. I opened up the console, browsed the C:\ drive backup of the downstairs PC until I found the directory with the savegames then copied over the file from the backup.
Daddy had saved the day.
Granted, I did have to take away the computer from the 9yo for a week for yelling at his brother and saying a few nasty words that I did not know he knew, but I was the Hero that day.
And on a sidenote, I love being able to stream music, videos, and pictures to my PS3. We had some friends over last weekend and we were able to show all the pictures from our Thanksgiving Vacation to Disney wirelessly right to the Playstation 3. I can't wait for the next firmware for that thing so I can watch my colection of DivX movies.
Would you be will to contact me at whsforum@microsoft.com Our Windows Home Server PR loved your story!
- Real BAD idea!
ColinWH wrote: The downside, I installed a camera on it to watch the workshop where the servers live, however, it now means the Wife can check up far too easily.
My comment:
It's slam, bam, darn, FANTASTIC! Love it!!!
I have a home built Home Theater PC (HTPC) that never worked well with XP and 3rd party software. So I built it back from the ground up with a new motherboard, 45W dual core processor, and more RAM. Installed Windows Vista Home Premium as the new OS to get multimedia. Family immediately knew how to use it and all was well until the primary and only drive started to not be found on boot intermittantly. So I removed the drive, put in a Raptor that I had lying around (ok, more heat but fast) and ran the System Restore CD from WHS. In a shorter time than reinstalling an OS and applications from scratch, the PC was back up and the family was once again enjoying their media.
The file sharing on WHS is also superior to a shared drive approach used before. And my wife has the peace of mind that we have a redundant backup solution.
The house is a much more peaceful place with our WHS solution.
- My daughter's PC had two hard drives in it, both nearly full. Since the PC case can only hold 2 drives, I bought a new 500GB drive for her birthday to replace the 40GB system disk. In the past when I had to rebuild a PC like this, it would have taken a full day to install Windows and all of the other applications she uses. So I was very grateful for the WHS PC restore that allowed me to format the new drive and restore the system disk with only about 10 minutes of my time. The PC was up and running in a few hours, and much of that time was spent formatting the new disk. She is thrilled with the amount of free space she has for photos and tunes, and I am very pleased with the time saved and the knowledge that the restore process will work for me when I need it.
Now, my next step is to take care of our extended family. My father-in-law, who lives in Ireland, has a laptop where he loads his digital photos, and the hard drive crashed back in June. He is in his 70s, is not very tech-savvy, and has some trouble learning and remembering complicated procedures like burning pictures to a CD-ROM. He lost hundreds of photos as a result of never backing anything up. I installed a new drive for him and got him up and running and he took the PC home after a recent visit. Now I can get him to upload his photos to my WHS and we can prevent a future loss. The upload process is easy for him to use, now we get to share the photos as well from 3000 miles away.
I've only had the server for about three weeks now, but it is already proving that it is well worth the price I paid for it. I was on my way from Colorado Springs to Denver to attend a Microsoft event when my wife called me and said her computer wouldn't boot. After some over-the-phone troubleshooting her computer wasn't finding the boot drive for her Vista desktop. I told her where the WHS recovery CD was and walked her through the process of performing her own recovery from the Home Server. She had it started before I went in to the event and it was finished by the time I got out. She was so proud of herself for doing her own recovery. That incident alone justified the purchase of the software, but there have been 4 other times that I have recovered computers with no loss of data due to the WHS.
I also have used Whiist to set up a shared photo album for all of the relatives to view. Everyone loves the ability to view or upload their own photos, especially since we are spread all over the US.
Hi guys n babes,
I have not been having any problems at all w/ WHS RTM. My 3- Vista HP restores worked great for my other beta testing.
Even tho i have a old clunker (Dell 4100 @ 1Ghz) the thing has proved to work just fine doing backups when i want & restores when i want too.
From Vista Ult. I uploaded 7.5GB of (.wma) music using the Shared Folders shortcut, that worked perfect too, playing them from the Shared Folders shortcut works perfecto, on any rig i want.
I love this OS & I plan on keeping it.
Hello,
I've been running WHS for right at a month now. The features that I like the most are backup and remote access.
I travel a lot and this week while I was on the road, one of my eBay auctions ended. I was able to log into my home desktop machine, confirm payment through office email, print a USPS shipping label to my office printer and have my wife ship the box. Showed a couple of my colleagues and they were mighty impressed.
If this weren't enough, the real exciting benefit to WHS is that my bald spot is starting to fill in with new hair!!
- I've been using WHS since the beta. I never really employed a backup solution before for my computers at home. Over the last year, however, I've used the restore feature several times simply because it was quicker and easier than figuring out what caused the problem and diagnosing it.
Loving it here... I'm in the military and currently deployed to Antarctica. To make the separation easier on my kids I started making them videos of various aspects of life "on the ice". The first one was just a quick hello so after compressing it with Movie Maker it was easily small enough to e-mail. All of the other videos I have made have been too large for e-mail so I started uploading them to the videos folder on the WHS. I was able to walk my wife through opening the shared folders by the link that the connector software had put on her desktop. Now that she knows where the videos are stored she can show them to the kids anytime. The kids really love it. My five year old daughter even talks to the computer while the videos are playing. They had a childrens book about penguins in the store so I bought it and recorded me reading it. I just uploaded it. Tomorrow night I will get to read my kids a bedtime story despite being on the other side of the planet. It may not be the biggest disaster I have recovered from using WHS, but it is the best thing I have used it for.
- And my most recent success story:
I've been testing Vista on a second bootable partition on my desktop workstation, and have finally decided that I'm going to use it as my primary OS. Problem was that the initial installation of Vista was on a relatively small partition on my RAID array, so in order to really use Vista I needed to move some partitions around. (The tool I use is Acronis Disk Director.) The bootable CD version of ADD doesn't include drivers for my RAID controller, so I have to do these things with the array online, rather than offline. Obviously, this is a dangerous thing to do...
To make a long story short, there were problems during the resize, which resulted in the partitions being correctly resized, but the Vista partition's MFT and alternate were hosed. Before WHS, this would have been a disaster (with a corrupt MFT, no files can be accessed). With WHS, it was a minor Saturday night speedbump. I tried repairing the OS, which left it still unable to boot. So I inserted the WHS Restore CD, plugged in my USB flash drive with drivers, and rebooted. I installed the drivers and started the restore, then my wife and I went to the movies. When I got back, the restore had finished (probably in about 20 minutes), so I removed the Restore CD and rebooted. Everything was back to where it had been when the backup ran the previous night.
WHS saved me from a fairly ugly Saturday night and Sunday rebuilding my workstation... Bought an OEM version of WHS. Popped it onto an new PC assembled for the purpose with a single 250 GB HDD. No problem installing it and setting everything up. Tonight added 2 new 250 GB HDD's for additional storage/backup. All went smoothly. WHS is making a significant contribution to managing our home network/data. Hoewever, early days and I'll be watching how this all unfolds. I still have a few wish-list items such as email and a bulletin board. Have read the threads re email and kind of agree with the reasons for not putting email into WHS (as much as I'd like to see it there).
Cold Deck wrote: I'm in the military and currently deployed to Antarctica. To make the separation easier on my kids I started making them videos of various aspects of life "on the ice". The first one was just a quick hello so after compressing it with Movie Maker it was easily small enough to e-mail. All of the other videos I have made have been too large for e-mail so I started uploading them to the videos folder on the WHS. I was able to walk my wife through opening the shared folders by the link that the connector software had put on her desktop. Now that she knows where the videos are stored she can show them to the kids anytime. The kids really love it. My five year old daughter even talks to the computer while the videos are playing. They had a childrens book about penguins in the store so I bought it and recorded me reading it. I just uploaded it. Tomorrow night I will get to read my kids a bedtime story despite being on the other side of the planet. It may not be the biggest disaster I have recovered from using WHS, but it is the best thing I have used it for.
This one gets my vote for a number of reasons.
Cold Deck wrote: I'm in the military and currently deployed to Antarctica. To make the separation easier on my kids I started making them videos of various aspects of life "on the ice". The first one was just a quick hello so after compressing it with Movie Maker it was easily small enough to e-mail. All of the other videos I have made have been too large for e-mail so I started uploading them to the videos folder on the WHS. I was able to walk my wife through opening the shared folders by the link that the connector software had put on her desktop. Now that she knows where the videos are stored she can show them to the kids anytime. The kids really love it. My five year old daughter even talks to the computer while the videos are playing. They had a childrens book about penguins in the store so I bought it and recorded me reading it. I just uploaded it. Tomorrow night I will get to read my kids a bedtime story despite being on the other side of the planet. It may not be the biggest disaster I have recovered from using WHS, but it is the best thing I have used it for.
Hi Cold Deck,
Would you be willing to talk with our PR guy? If you are, can you please send me an e-mail to whsforum@microsoft.com
I really, realy like WHS. Since I installed the OEM version a couple of months ago I think I have used every feature available from file restores, to system restore, to streaming music, movies, and photos to my Media Centre PC, to remote access and web page usage.
My WHS computer looks after 5 physical computers and 2 Virtual PCs.
I have received phone calls at my work from my kids and have been able to restore homework projects that the kids have lost by restoring the files from the most recent backup. I did this by using remote access to the homework computer from my desk at work and then running the restore. The kids know how to do this now so they can restore files without ringing me.
I decided to install another OS onto one of my home PCs, so I took a manual backup then installed the new OS. After a few days I decided I needed to go back to the other OS, so I used the restore CD and restored the PC back to the way it was before the OS install. Everything worked perfectly.
I lost a hard disk in the WHS computer. I had to start again with the backups, but because of duplication none of the files on the WHS were lost. The disk was replaced and things became healthy again. No big drama there.
I use several Add-ons like whiist and now have several web pages that can be accessed remotely, and thanks to the recent November update there are no certificate warnings.
Movies play seemelessly on my Media Centre PC streamed directly from the WHS computer, my music plays well.
I actually don't have a bad thing to say about it, great product.
My sister in Canada is doing a picture project for my parents and wanted me to sent her pictures, after some fooling around using WHiist I was able to get the photo album up and running and allow my sister to rummage through the pictures online. In addition to this since she is going through everyone's pictures to create a photo album she now also has the ability to upload pictures to be added to the album. Once I can prove that it works properly I'm going to let the rest of my family members how to upload pictures and let them all go to town...
It's like a personal add free picture book. Thanks to the Whiist add-in I actually plan to run a mini-website off my server once I get things tweaked and operational...
I wanted to upgrade a laptop from a 40 gig to an 80 gig har disk. I backed up the 40, installed the 80 and did a restore. I was back in business within a couple of hours.
Brian
This actually happened about 3 months ago...I logged into my computer and I was looking for a MS Word file with my thesis. I had completed quite a bit of work and I had several revisions done so far. I checked the desktop for the file and it wasn't there! I was wondering if I had the file somewhere else (on the server or a laptop I use for school), but the most recent version wasn't around! I turned off "Previous Versions" on vista so that wasn't a help.
Well, I knew that the server had the files backed up daily so I went to the server-backups to find the file. Apparently, I deleted the file by accident about 3 days before I was looking for it. I don't know how i deleted it (maybe my toddler deleted it?). Anyways, the backup had the latest version I was working on so I copied it from the backup and I only had to add the most recent updates to the thesis!
Thanks WHS Team!
my story started with the CTP program for WHS earlier this year, went on to RC and i just reinstalled it with OEM yesterday.
Originally i had a computer for home use and time goes, my wife and i moved to laptop and the desktop lies not use in. I turned on file sharing to store the data such as photos, files, etc. Image of the laptops are routinely made but management of these images is a big headache.
After installing WHS and moving all existing data to the WHS, management of the data is simplified and i no longer has to worry about moving data to new harddisk nor backing up of data.
My wife is going her Ph.D right now and her data is her lifeline. we used to use the desktop as a data store but keeping the data up to date is a problem constantly. With the WHS, she is now able to perform weekly backup of her laptop when she brings her laptop back from work. The true test of the WHS came in when she went over to france for a 7 weeks attachment. I backed up her laptop just before she left for france and towards the end of her attachment, the laptop suffered a harddisk failure. we are able to recover the laptop to the condition just before she left for france. the only thing lost will be the data collected in france and that will remain the shortfall and improvement that we will like to see. *note, she's currently using a Macbook running WinXP.
I also tried streaming picture and music to my PS3 which is connected to the network wirelessly. i am about to stream music smoothly. video not tested until PS3 supports DivX. the PS3 is about to detect the WHS without any settings done.
As for my upgrade part, i am about to test out a range of upgrade options, both recorded in the documentations and out of the documentations. i started with 2 SATA 80gb harddisk, added a 80gb PATA harddisk, change 1 to a 160gb SATA harddisk. I also did the extreme of pulling the 80gb pata harddisk out to simulate the failure of a harddisk and replace it with a 160gb harddisk. the replacement is easy but balancing takes forever and backup service stopped working after this stunt. lucky the machine was running RC and i was about to change it to OEM.
For my current OEM setup, i also tried something out of the books. Instead of doing a reinstallation, i choose the new installation option. before the new installation the RC machine has data located on the 160gb sata and 80 gb pata harddisk, storage balanced before i pull my stunt of taking out the 80gb harddisk. in theory, 1 copy of the data will be on either harddisk. for the new installation, i disconnect the 160gb harddisk and performed the installation. after the OEM machine is setup, i am about to connect the 160gb harddisk to the WHS using a SATA-USB adapter and restore them to their respective location. i also restore the computer backup data to the respective location. all that remains will be to add all other harddisk to the storage pool and let the balancing do its work. should all else fail, my data will still be in the 80gb PATA harddisk which i have disconnected earlier. i know its a little extreme but its really pushing the limit to the max. the data size tallies with the file size and this will really simulate emergency recovery of data
KS
Singapore
Joel, this may not be the typical story, but here goes.
As others have said, I do enjoy haveing the WHS and use it to share files with family in other parts of the country.
But, what I like best is being able to consolidate several servers (all using electricity) into one HP Media Smart appliance. I had a server running Server 2003 and I had the beta/rc WHS running on another computer. After purchasing the HP, I was able to move all of the data from the two other servers and retire them.
I am now backing up six computers in my home and moved all music and video data to the home server where it can be shared with the xbox 360s and the other computers in the house. Before, we had this content everywhere.
date: 16 dec 2007
time: 8:30am
i need my computer. my computer needs me.
last night, i surfed. not unusual for a saturday night.
not in this town anyway.
this morning, i drank coffee and tried to cover my tracks.
(no need to scare the children.)
unfortunately for me, the recent software upgrade to my favorite
internet debris eraser, did more than i bargained for.
i stepped away for a coffee refill only to return and find
(iolo system mechanic 7) had erased 20,000 files and wasn't
done yet. seems all my data, pictures and iTunes were considered
merely debris. so much for my taste in music.
my EMC Retrospect backup wasnt going to help me either.
the pacman sized glitch had seen to that.
it had been a victim too. it never stood a chance.
time to bring in the heavy artillery.
i slid the windows home server recovery cd into the holster,
put my Durangos on and sat back. i let that pony run
for 90 minutes.it never even broke a sweat.
and there i was, back to the future.
the 4am backup was restored and all that was left
for me to do was remove the offending software before
it could erase my disk. weird.
Not 2 days after receiving and setting up my HP MediaSmart Server EX470 I needed it to perform a full system restore on my primary desktop PC. The server had already done an initial full backup and one incremental since I'd installed it, which turned out to be very fortunate.
The full restore was needed after a failed update of my Vista Ultimate desktop to Vista SP1 RC1. Something misfired during the update and my system became very unstable. Rather than fool with uninstalling SP1 or trying a System Restore I decided a full system restore from my Windows Home Server would be the cleanest alternative. And besides, what an excellent reason to try the feature!
The full system restore was flawless, kudos to the MS development team for WHS and HP for the MediaSmart Server implementation! The only issue worthy of note is the time to complete the restore vs. using Vista's built-in "Complete PC backup" feature. Although quite a bit slower than Vista's built-in capability it was very easy to accomplish and worked flawlessly. The benefits of having choices of sequential backup instances to restore from offset the time impact IMHO.
And I must say, this is quite an attractive appliance sitting here next to my desk where I can see it clearly. No more worries about losing data (except for a catastrophy). There is a comforting "peace of mind" attitude now that we're up and running!
Thanks to all involved in bringing this server software and hardware to market! Both are very welcome in my home and blend beautifully into my technology suite!
Doug
Well I know that this has had to happen to all uf us so here it is. I had just put the trial ver of WHS on a dell poweredge 1420 server to kick it around and see if it was better to use for my home than the SBS i was using at the time.
Now comes the good part I had just purchased a HP Pavilion dv9205us laptop to replace the dell that had died. approx 3 months into playing with WHS my wifi card stop working and after trying all the things the person on the phone wanted me to do found that I was going to have to return the laptop to them for service. Not bad right? Well they tell you to make sure you have a backup of all your files before you send them the computer and they mean it.
When I recived my laptop back from the with the working wifi card I also had a system that was back to the way it was when I first purchased it and I mean purchased it. No account on it nothing but the system is starting vista for the first time so lets set me up to run for you ough!
Well I had back up the system with the hard wire network card the day that I had ship it out to them so I thought this would be the test of all test for WHS to prove its claims put in the restore cd and reboot the laptop. about 30 mins later BAM system is right where it was before shiping to HP. and with the working wifi card.
well I was so impressed with the out come that my wife ask me what I wanted for Xmas this year so I told her the HP mediasmart home server running the full ver of WHS no time bomb , well she sas to me how much we do have 4 kids to get gifts for too. I tell her 750.00 and no payments for 90 days from hpstore.
She tells me ok get it but thats going to be your big gift this year, I tell her that it can be my only gift this year if she wants, reason I just purchased a laptop for her and I know that one of these nights she is going to tell me some thing is not right with it and If I have the latest back up for it i just saved myself a ton of work. but I did not tell her that or that she has a laptop under the tree to play with.
BTW I purchased the EX475 with the 1TB option installed so next xmas I can get her to get me the HDD to make it 2TB.
the unit came in on the 18th and she let me play with it right away so its up and running as I type this and working fine. put the box under the tree so that it looks good.
Mark
- I have been using WHS since the Beta days and when the OEM was available from NewEgg I jump at the chance and got it. So we have been using to store family photos and our music library via Firefly. This is great product. Just recently I did the ultimate test of using the Restore CD on my work laptop. There was something that I had installed (MS Virtual PC 2007 or Powershell) caused my system to BSOD after about 15 minutes running via my VPN client. So I backed up a few critical data files that I changed that day and put the Restore CD in, booted up the laptop and proceeded to restore the system using the previous nights backup. After about an hour or so, I went and watched tv while this was running, I was back in business. This definitely saved me time in rebuilding the laptop, without WHS it would have been 8 hours of rebuilding the OS and reinstalling all of my applications. This has to be one of Microsoft's best products that have come down the line.
Like others, I also had a very easy time setting up WHS and it "just works". Luckily, I haven't had a data loss tragedy for WHS to save the day, but I do have a good story related to WHS.
After getting WHS set up configuring the various PCs (Vista and XP Pro) in the house for back-ups and remote access, I decided to try out WHIIST to share photo albums more easily with my family. I put up a good sampling of pictures from our 2 most recent vacations with zero coding, once again "it just worked". I sent an email out to my family and the response was great. What was even better was when my dad asked if he could also post photo albums on my WHS box. I set up a new website for him through WHIIST and added an account for him all through the WHS Console. I gave my dad the simple instructions for connecting and uploading files to his website. He then made it his mission to put as many photos as he could on the site. Every third day or so, I'd check on his progress. One of those times yielded a great discovery for me. My dad had put up an early childhood photo including himself, his brother and his uncle. I never knew his uncle, but looking at the picture, I could have sworn it was my own brother Clay. They looked nearly identical. I never knew that tidbit about my own family and it took WHS to enable me to find out.
--Gordon
I've got one from beta that made up my mind about buying it as soon as it came out.
I had recently upgraded to Windows Vista Business on my laptop and was putting things back onto it as I had chose to do a reinstall. About a month went by when i realized my bluetooth drivers were not installed. I tried to get them via windows update but they were not on there yet so I had to install them by hand. I looked online and thought I had found them so I installed them and it was only after I restarted that they were not right! Windows would allways crash on bootup and rather than fiddle around in safe mode to uninstall them I just poped in my WHS restore disk and 40minutes later I had successfully restored my previous nights backup. Found the right drivers and I was good to go!I was screwing around with my machine today and overclocked just a tad too much. The system bsod'd and after a re-boot I got the %windows%system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupted message. I have an old copy of Norton Ghost and have it set to image the drive weekly. I put the Ghost cd in the cd drive as I have done many times, but it would only boot to PC DOS instead of starting the recovery environment. After contacting Symantec and being told that Ghost 9 wasn't supported anymore (and if I were to upgrade to version 12, the current backups would not work), I put the WHS Home PC Restore CD in the tray and I was up and running about 15 minutes later.
WHS worked like a charm. Not to mention it is much faster than my old Ghost solution.
I have a home brew WHS system. It is running on an old Asus A7N8X-VM motherboard, Athlon XP 2800+ processor, 1 gig memory, a Seagate 500 gig and a Seagate 120 gig hard drive, a 500 watt Antec psu, and a D-Link gigabit lan card. The lan card helped my data throughput even though it is bottlenecked through the pci bus.
I highly recommend WHS to anyone who screws around with their system like I do!
Randall Davis
My story is pretty simple, but here goes. Been using WHS since beta, now have retail copy. 5 pc's besides the WHS in the house.
My main computer, an Athlon 64 FX60 2GB box with Vista Ultimate is getting flakey. About 3 weeks ago, trying to uninstall one antispyware/antivirus package and install another, my computer was pretty screwed up. After uninstalling one and doing all the things recommended on the vendors web site regarding being sure directories were deleted and all, I went to install the other one. BSOD during the install!! Whew. Rebooting, trying again, same thing. Rebooting, no uninstall choice for the new one. What to do? Finally, on the third attempt to install, it did it. Now I had an uninstall choice. But, the new one was giving Vista Security Center warnings about no AV/AS. Tried to uninstall. BSOD during uninstall. Tried a Vista Restore Point, wouldn't do it, went thru the act, but on reboot, it said it failed. Tried a couple restore points, wouldn't restore!! Whoa, getting scarier by the minute. Well, I think, time to try a real life restore with WHS. Pretty freaked even though I had a pretty much unusable OS, so I went to local BB and got a new 320 gig SATA HD, plugged it into SATA 1 on the MB where the previous OS was booting from, it on a 250 GB. Ran WHS restore CD, 50 minutes later, back going with only the clock not set right!! Whew, one happy guy here.
Since this time, all in the last two weeks, what with a flakey installed OS seeming like it's getting worse, I've done 4 complete reinstalls back and forth on 2 hard drives and every one has worked flawlessly!! I even tried the AV/AS uninstall/uninstall again with the same result, sucker that I am!! Moving on with old AV/AS and restored OS.
This computer, the flakey one, WON'T boot the Windows Ultimate retail DVD, thinking I'd do a new install on the same hardware, like Vista wasn't supposed to need. I've tried setting DVD/CD drives to master/slave, using CS both ways, CD master, DVD master, put them on both IDE controllers on motherboard, tried the DVD drive alone, and tried 3 different DVD drives. I booted the DVD on 3 other computers, so it's NOT the disk. It will NOT boot the DVD on this ONE COMPUTER. It runs the grey bar, then the Green Microsoft Corporation scroller, then the drive stops spinning and then the screen goes black and that's that.
OK, ordered a bunch of hardware to build a new computer, no problem. Awaiting the parade of FedEX/UPS trucks.
I do have one question, and perhaps if I don't get a reply here, sort of off topic, I'll post a new topic!! I built my WHS on sort of old hardware, Athlon XP 3000+, IDE hard drives, 3 totaling 650 GB, 1 GB of RAM. I'd like to build a better box, newer motherboard, newer RAM, SATA hard drives now that I see how useful this Home Server thing really IS. But, will I be able to install my WHS OEM copy on new hardware, or am I screwed and have to buy again? I would NOT use 2 WHS boxes but replace one with the other. I could claim the old motherboard died, with a clean conscience, but what's the rule on this?
I swore off anything to do with desktop PCs back in 2002, so I had to start fresh back in 2/07 when I was accepted into WHS beta program. Now with 10 drives, extra ram and tv tuner card later....
Like many here, backups saved me once about 10 months ago, and I do love this feature. But I love the all in one solution of WHS that brings the past, present and future all together in one box. one of the first thing I did was to move all my VHS, Beta, mini and DV home movie tapes that we've had for the past 20 plus years to DVD format and Reel to Reel tapes (remember those?) to mp3 format all into WHS box It was an amazing experience seeing these again, especially because some we didn't even know existed. Although I've kept tape players in storage becuase of our home movies and music, it must have been almost 30 years since I've had a reel to reel player hooked up, 15 years for beta tape player and at least 4 years for VHS player. Seriously, how often do you watch those home videos on tapes or hook up camcorders to tv to watch them, but now that it's in WHS, it's only a few clicks away from showing my 18 year old when he took his first steps. My next project is to scan in our entire photo collection to store in WHS. I could have moved all these tapes to DVD a while back, but that wasn't the solution I was looking for.Not totally satisfied with using the WHS for what it was primarily intended for, I've recently added a tv tuner card and discovered a whole new use for the WHS box. Just love this box! In addition to performing its normal duties, it is now feeding live and recorded tv programs and FM radio streams to our laptops from anywhere in the house. It's brought a whole new meaning to the term, "Couch Potato." One more thing I'll be doing in the next few weeks will be to add a media extender to connect the server to my widescreen TV.
Yeah, WHS backup saved me once, but it has done a quite bit more for us since then. I'm just wondering what more WHS can do for me and am looking forward to the 2.0 release.
I had to use the restore my laptop the other night (partition table went whacky – BIOS said it couldn’t find a boot device). I went looking for the PP1 Restore CD, and found that only the readme.txt existed. I then downloaded the Dual-Boot Restore ISO, burned a copy, and proceeded to initiate a restore. Once I figured out that ANY other WHS activity on my home-built box generated network timeout errors and stopped them, the restore proceeded smoothly.
The only difficulty I had was the need to partition the HD using the Partition Management tool included. It seems to me that the best scenario would be for the Restore CD to automagically partition and format the drives with the same partition sizes that the backup bits know about. It was relatively easy for me to figure it out, but put the same situation into my daughter’s or my dad’s hands and they’ll never discover the problem or its resolution. The worst difficulty I encountered was that WHS lists the partition sizes in the backups using GB while the Partition Management tool uses MB. And each seems to calculate the size of a byte differently! Guessing the appropriate sizes after midnight just doesn't work for my old brain.
I also love the ability to remote into my home network from anywhere:
Need a file while I'm away from home? No problem. Just go grab it.
Want to ensure that my daughter's laptop got backed up while she was home from college? Just check from the web.
Don't have time to install the latest WHS add-in because of all those evening appointments? Do it remotely during lunchtime.
Want to check the logs and see what websites that homeschooled adolescent son has been surfing while I'm at work? Just remote in and look.
Recently my ISP changed authentication methods for POP3 email service. I can no longer reply to email unless I'm directly connected to my ISP. (e.g. I can read email at the local Tully's Coffeeshop but can't reply until I get home.) With WHS I can remote into one of my home computers from the web and send and receive email just as if I was sitting at home.
I gotta say WHS rocks!
- I have had an interest in computers and programming since 16K RAM was state of the art for home computers. Imagine using your cassette recorder as "drive".....
When my oldest daughter lost the memories from her 9th school-year due to a blue-screen situation in combination with the manufacturer's poor re-installation configuration, I realised that something had to be done. I started making CD backups every month. Then MP3s and digital photos began filling up the drives and even DVDs weren't enough for backup. Extra drives were installed. A SAN was purchased including a great back-up software but it still needed manual attention to make sure it did what it was supposed to.
When I first heard of WHS I couldn't wait until the day I was going to get it.It seemed to have everything we needed. Then one day it was available through a net-shop. Yeah! I ordered it and purchased the hardware. On a cold and rainy Xmas holiday evening, me and my youngest daughter built our server from a Gigabyte mobo (integrated graphics), Intel 2140 CPU, 4 x 1GB RAM and 2 x 500GB drives. And it worked. We installed the WHS OS and it worked. Then we installed the connector SW and it ... didn't work :-( . We tried everything and finally it came clear that it was a matter of client firewall settings. But we had three different ones. And it also took some time to realise that the Compaq Evo 310 didn't like being connected to the switch; had to be the router.
Nevertheless, ever since, it has been like a dream. Pictures, music and videos available for everyone from one source. Backups are made auto-magically and if the clients are not reachable during night, I realised that just switching them on during breakfast does the job. It really calmed the nerves of the family IT mgr. And all of a sudden all members of the family understood what computers and networks is all about....
We do not regret one milli-sec investing in this! I have to say I'm very impressed with everyone's stories! I have shared many of them and their unique situations to our team members and it has inspired many of them to read through this thread. I wanted to take the time to thank everyone for sharing and continuing to be a part of this community!
These were awesome stories!
- Here is one from this post:
http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2831881&SiteID=50
A couple days ago I spent many long hours working on something that I considered critical enough that I was saving changes to my pc and to a public share on another computer as well as having autosave every hour on the application.
Somehow I lost both copies of the file, which I still don't understand (it was to do having the files open on two client machines and both saved copies as well at the same time in different windows). It was an open source application that I just started using last week. When I say "lost" the file was there but all the data was in in blank new document state.
I had left this application open overnight during the backup to WHS as well as another automated windows backup to a different machine.
So I figured no big deal I will just go to the backups and recover the file. First I go to my other backup and try to recover the file. Sure enough it is there but it is a version from about 1/2 way through the day???? Hmmm turns out I had been saving only to my public share copy later in the day(My bad) and that was wiped out as well and of course no backup for that.
Sugar, sugar, sugar...what to do now????????
So I go and load up the backup on WHS. Sure enough the same version of the file as was stored under my other backup of my documents. So it is also missing the last 8 hours of work late into the night.
I had also saved this application as an Html before I went to bed and that was all there but I could not get it back into the source application that generated the Html.
So I go to the reading room and ponder what to do. I get thinking that the program was running and where the heck is the autosave going. So I look it up and sure enough it saves it to an application directory under documents and settings.
I check the autosave directory and the autosave versions are now gone as I had closed the documents and application which clears out the files.
Of course on my none WHS backup I strictly backup "My Documents" which does not include the application settings under my user.(NOTE TO SELF: Change that automated backup).
So I go back into the WHS backup and go into the applications settings, and staring up at me like beautiful jewels, are my application files saved hourly by the autosave all nice and intact!
I copy the latest autosave version back into my application and Bob's your uncle I am back in business..
WOOOOOOO WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
I am a happy camper!!!!!!!! - I nuked a couple workstations with a delete command in the windows directory, dumped the MFT, ditched the partition, basically did cruel and unspeakable things to Windows workstations
that would have taken me hours to manually recover from, if at all.
Boot CD. Restore. 10 minutes. Done. I can't do anything in software to break workstations anymore, so that is a pretty big deal for me. I read in the WHS Forums of all the problems and complaints and I too have some problems with Windows Home Server, but I would like to Send Some Flowers. I have been using WHS since the first Beta was released to CPT. I really like the WHS Backup Concept and I’m glad they went ahead and released it early to get input from real life hands on Beta testers. I was trying to keep 5 Computers backed up using Volume Images; It was Driving Me Crazy and Costing Me an Arm and a Leg buying larger hard drives to store the images. DVD’s wasn’t even practical for archiving ~ 250 – 350 gb of data. I say again “It Was Driving Me Crazy” Just think about all that data in just ~ 150 gb and it all runs unattended overnight. For all those that complain – all they have to do is access and watch the WHS Forums, Blogs, Connect, MSDN, TechNet and Knowledge Base, etc. to get information and solve their problems. Restore is quick and easy, so much so that I have started using Backup then turning the backup off to Archive Old Volume Configurations that I want to save for future restores if needed. Just like the same concept that is used for Virtual Machine Configurations. I can restore a Saved Basic OPS in just a few minutes. Also the ease and advantage of Shared Folders for me and others; and also Remote Access when I am away from Home. I have an advantage over most others, in that I have ~50 years of experience with computer systems and have been able to work out most of my problems, but I am glad the Microsoft WHS Team Released the Product and didn’t sit on it! I know that the WHS Development Team is Peddling As Fast As They Can to make Windows Home Server a Stable Software Solution. I have worked on OPS Systems that after ~6-7 years, Bugs Have Crawled Out of It. I have a problem Posted Now http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2598836&SiteID=50 - That I am asking for help to solve, but having Windows Home Server to use is Much Better Than Not Having It. I am sure in the future we will find many more ways to use this product! - - - Regards - Shorto
Joel, I bought the HP EX-470 for use as a file server and it's fantastic. Aside from my own lack of knowledge with routers, I have not had one problem. I realize it's not intended to be used as a file server, but anyone looking for a FAST access file server, with remote access capabilities, that also backs up network workstations, it's awsome. I'm using it as a single drive server until MS gets the corruption problem handled. There is zero latency.
Some day I may look at using it for some of the 'fun' stuff, but for now, it's a great little file server.
Dick Day
Well, after months of using my home-built home server for nightly backups, media streaming, and serving a couple of web sites, (all very stable and smooth) I finally had the occassion to use the restore functionality.
I back up my work laptop along with my various home computers. At work we use Exchange for email. Recently I realized that I was missing about a two-month block of email, which for some in the software business is nothing short of critical. I don't understand how they were lost, but I'd suspect it (as much as I hate to admit it) that it was user error, probably during one of my manual archiving procedures.
So apparenlty my IT department doesn't have a mechanism to regularly backup our email (which I still find hard to believe given SOX compliance these days), so I was on my own. After a little thought it occurred to me that at some point in time these emails were likely contained in my laptop's local Outlook OST file. Sure enough, after browsing through various backup points and looking through the OST files I found my lost emails. I opened the file in Outlook, exported it to a PST file and voila, my two months of emails have been happily restored and integrated back into my email system.
I love it when a good backup system pulls through in a dire situation!
Aaron
Man, that exact thing happened to me. However, I had to replay/open all those darn Lego StarWars levels again by myself. It took a whole weekend. I am installing my WHS tonight, after figuring out how to get it running on an old dell poweredge 2500.
Funny story though, I can definitely relate.
Friday night I went to my kids’ school auction. My wife was the auction chair and was also responsible for publishing the catalog of items up for auction. About 2 weeks ago she was up late working on the catalog when about midnight her machine just flat out died. I tried to revive it but to no avail. We installed InDesign on my kids’ computer, logged into our home server, fished out the catalog doc, and away she went. It took about as long as it takes to install InDesign. We were even more fortunate that our backup window had picked up her machine in such a way that she barely lost any work.
The auction went great. Thanks to Windows Home Server, my kids will have text books next year J
Jay
Hi Joel. I hope you or someone you can recommend that can help a somewhat literate Windows XP user. I've had a problem with Windows trying to reload when I log in and asking for the Sonic module when I sign in to my email (high-speed internet). Where can I go to get plain English on how to solve this problem? Is this Sonic module absolutely necessary? They just keep trying to load, load, load until I cancel enough times to get to my emails!dazee wrote: Hi Joel. I hope you or someone you can recommend that can help a somewhat literate Windows XP user. I've had a problem with Windows trying to reload when I log in and asking for the Sonic module when I sign in to my email (high-speed internet). Where can I go to get plain English on how to solve this problem? Is this Sonic module absolutely necessary? They just keep trying to load, load, load until I cancel enough times to get to my emails! This forum is for Windows Home Server. You might want to try the XP forums.
- Hurricane Ike...grabbed the WHS (and my family of 5) and ran. I kept the case box with styrofoam for secure packing. We keep our important hard copies (titles, school/medical records, and insurance policies, etc.) in a special portable file case, so with two simple tasks, the car was loaded for evacuation. Insurance will replace the client hardware...not the data. We dodged major damage, but several neighbors had trees through the roofs and extensive water damage. My family was fortunate, and during the evacuation I had no worries about irreplaceable losses. That peace-of-mind alone is worth the minor cost and effort of setting up a WHS.
Hurricane Rita in 2005 was a different story. I had no server but five systems and several external drives, mostly with outdated backups and media files scattered across all the machines. I tried to rush through a backup process and ended up trashing what I had, so I just gave up. Luckily (for us) the storm veered away, but I vowed I wouldn't be that unprepared again. WHS made it easy...just grab it and go. - Well I for one would like to tell you a story. If you had asked me a year ago when I first installed Home Server or even a few months ago when I was assisting with the beta of the Power Pack, I would of told you that Home Server was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but not anymore.
Microsoft's increased activity to thwart piracy has gone overboard in this users opinion and now everything they touch with activation and/or WGA breaks and then can't be fixed. After more than a year of running Home Server without issue, performing every update religiously, participating in the Power Pack beta program and so on and so on, after evidently recent security updates from Microsoft I now have a boat anchor or brick. I believe this is a result of this last Tuesday's updates but I can not be sure. Why because nobody including Microsoft can even log in to my Home Server anymore to diagnose it. Why, because although Microsoft makes the following statement on thier activation information page -IMPORTANT NOTE: The software activation status does not impact the services running on the server. Even if the hardware goes out of tolerance and you are asked to reactivate it, services will continue to run, even if the software is not reactivated. Not activating will generate persistent notifications reminding you to activate the server. Services and remote administration are not affected.
It is a bold face lie. I activated my legal product over a year ago, and now upon logging in from a client either via the client software or using Remote Console and logging in as an administrator, I am told my product is not activated and because it's not activated I can no longer even log in. You are given the option to Cancel - Which physically shuts the server down or to hit OK to activate the product. Upon hitting OK (thinking the worst case is I would have to call MS and reactivate) I am told that my product is already ACTIVATED. The only option here is an OK button once again. Hitting OK causes the client to actually disconnect totally from the Server. After multiple calls to not only the Product Activation department as well as at least 3 different technical support representatives (evidently all in India? all of them have Indian names with Very Heavy accents) and spending two hours on the phone. All they can tell me is to take the unit out of a secure closet that I custom cabled and installed the unit into (the way they advertise the product - headless) and hook up a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to it and then we will try something - what? Can't be done remotely - what's all this about running headless? I don't even have a DVD drive in the box anymore - it's all hard drives.
If you are asked to reactivate the software, you may be able to re-activate over the internet. If activating over the internet fails, you can call the telephone number displayed on the activation screen to reactivate the software. Get details about Microsoft Product Activation as implemented in Windows Server 2008.
Basically I am now past the point of frustration, I set up a FreeNAS box in about 15 minutes with no Activation and No WGA, copied all my Folder files off of the Home Server (backups of my 8 family computers I will just lose) and let the Home Server shut down. Now I have to desmantle it out of it's hidden secure environment, hook up a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and either reinstall MS Home Server - go through all this again just to have it do the same thing to me a year or so from now or when they apply some other anti-piracy component.
I think not. I give up Microsoft you won.. not only did you stop pirates, you also have stopped one of your most dedicated users who has given you his hard earned money and a whole lot of time. Now I am going to go install Linux on it or another FreeNAS installation - oh yeah I can have as many as I want and don't have to pay anything extra for it either - user limit restriction - nope don't have that either... hey wait a minute - I owe you a debt of gratitude Microsoft - Thanks for pushing me to free Open Source Linux - I guess I won't need that MCSE certification that I have held for the last 15 years either. How's that for a prize winning story - bet you it doesn't stay published for long. Enjoy while you can!
Ed Rauch
Greenville, SC USA - Well now, stories.
Not so much a story as a comparison between the "old" days and what WHS does for backup and rectore.
At the same time a few pointers on what could be tweeked to make life easier during a high stress time.
If any of you are old enough to go back to DOS1.1 days (yes I am that old) you will recall that restoring a trashed PC did not really change till ME shipped.
XP improved on that but unless you were part of a lan with a server edition OS your ability to recover was still not good.
Even under XP, the normal option was to re-install or pray a repair would work.
At best you were looking at hours and usually 2 to 3 days to get everything back to where it should be.
Now for WHS.
One of my first tests after stabilising the install and environment (Backups and full duplication, plus clones of the system disk in my test Client), was to trash a client system disk beyond recovery.
I did this by using a third party app to set the disk to "Free".
This produces a disk that is so bad , that if it is in the boot chain, the boot cycle fails and forces a reboot.
So the ultimate horror: can't boot, cant read the disk, can't see the WHS rescue disk, can't can't.
All is of course happy once the boot sequence is forced to ignore all Hard disks (In my case a Bios disable of the boot seek for hard disks).
WHS recovery boots.
Device detect takes off and sees the hard disk just fine, but can't see the ethernet card, so asks for drivers.
Now for the first issue.
Under WHS, to extract the essential drivers you must open the desired recovery file on a CLIENT machine.
You cannot open a backup on the WHS server.
From bitter real world experience, I can say this is NOT GOOD. You must assume that you can only access your backups through a single portal, and to restrict the primary portal in this way is asking for problems, and the sure situation where you can't get to your backups.
WHS should allow a direct Driver file extract without having to open the backup on any machine including the WHS server.
I have seen lots of threads on stalled WHS backup opens, it should not be needed.
O.K. got past that.
Now for Issue number two.
The select restore source/target window should list all potential devices, not just those that are formatted.
Even if that is not possible the Disk manager window should not open on the formated device view, it should open on the view showing all devices, which is where I eventually found my unformatted and free hard disk.
I knew it was there because Device Detect reported seeing it.
It was 15 minutes of messing around to eventually find that particular view in Disk Manager.
During a restore in a live situation, the poor chap praying that he has not lost his electronic life does not need that sort of problem.
Now to the good news.
Once I had negotiated the issues noted above I had the target client machine back up in under 30 minutes.
With a little better process flow or better hints and tips the total process should take even a neophite not much more than an hour (depending or restore size).
Compared to other ways of backup and recovery, this was a breeze (Sure beats 2 days, and twenty or so OS, driver and application disks).
So overall a four star effort on the backup/recovery for WHS.
Now for my next test.
How well does WHS rebuild a trashed/lost pool disk.
For this one I intend unplugging a USB connected pool disk mid operation (During a backup sounds about right), and see how WHS behaves.
Before I do that I will copy all the shares to my NAS, and isolate the NAS from the network (not that I am paranoid, but you never know).
I should be able to post the story on that test in about a week or two.
P.S. I like WHS, best MS OS I have seen since DOS 3.2.
