Facebook Trojan Virus... Not a problem if you have a Windows Home Server.

re: Facebook Trojan Virus... Not a problem if you have a Windows Home Server.

ozinca — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 06:32:41 GMT

Kevin

So I too love Windows Home Server. I have had it up since launch on my MSS.

Backup has also save me too a bunch of times BUT.

I cannot believe the fragility of the backup service.

I have 10 machines accounts backed up there (or should I say had).

The other night my house lost power and on reboot, I got a message saying my backup database was corrupted and I needed to recover it.

I did.

I ended up loosing 8 of the 10 backups in the recovery process. Some of these for machines that I had been keeping the backups for till I relocated the data.

Paul O'Farrell

The guy who still loves WHS only slightly less so.

re: Facebook Trojan Virus... Not a problem if you have a Windows Home Server.

grahamj — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 06:43:17 GMT

I have been running WHS since the V1 beta. I pretty much forgot it was there when it came to backups. Then in the space of 3 weeks recently I had reason to use the restore 3 times. These were two HD failures on different PC's and one a rebuild after having to send a laptop for warantee repair. The laptop was returned with the out of box setup. I am sure glad that it just does its thing every night without me having to think about. If you put any kind of value on your time and data (or relationship with your partner :)) then only one single unprotected failure will soon convince you of the value. The problem is far too many consumers aren't aware of the real risks or the existence of WHS to protect them. Also, too few retailers position the product correctly or attempt to educate the consumer.

Another case of the stay-at-home Server (Home Server) saves the day

Aaron Tiensivu's Blog — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:38:31 GMT

I'm still in the process of putting my Home Server together at some point soon. I just need many more hard drives for it and a computer. Minor detail, I know, but I will get there eventually! In the meantime, check out this case where Home Server save

re: Facebook Trojan Virus... Not a problem if you have a Windows Home Server.

Kevin Beares — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:07:32 GMT

Paul,

Sorry to hear that you had that issue with your Home Server Backup Database. Now, since I am a glass half full guy most of the time, I could still see this as a good thing. Home Server had an issue from a power failure and the database got corrupted. The great thing about it is that we at least detected a bad database condition and did our best to recover it without too much heavy lifting on your end. I am sure Home Server immediately started backing up all of your computers and within a few hours you were back to having backups of all of your machines.

This scenario of recovering your backup db is very near and dear to our hearts. I hope to see that feature sooner than later so that in the unlikely event you have something bad happen to your Home Server, you can recover it quickly just like you recover a machine.

I will have to confer with my colleagues, but I thought someone in the community or one of us wrote a tool or white paper on how to backup your backup db to an external drive. Anyone want to jump in and provide that information?

Thanks again for the comment,

Kevin

re: Facebook Trojan Virus... Not a problem if you have a Windows Home Server.

stormy1954 — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:58:14 GMT

At your own risk you could try the beta WHS Backup Database-Backup Add-In at

http://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2066

Not tried it myself.

re: Facebook Trojan Virus... Not a problem if you have a Windows Home Server.

j and v — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:57:28 GMT

@ Kevin Beares - "She got an email in her Facebook inbox from two of her friends. She clicked the link in the message and the rest was all badness."

Running without UAC (vista) or admin on XP I see.

@ozinca

Having a server without a Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is a recipe for disaster! I bought one for my home-built WHS and it will safely shutdown the WHS when the battery gets low. Love you WHS again by getting a UPS!

re: Facebook Trojan Virus... Not a problem if you have a Windows Home Server.

Kevin Beares — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:43:17 GMT

@ j and v - she was running UAC on Vista. The message came from someone that she really trusted and she conciously said OK through all of the prompts. In hind sight, she was like I was, Doh! Do you remember NIMDA and the "I love you" virus?

The critical thing here is that we all make mistakes. It is how we recover from them that is critical. In this case, we have WHS as our primary back up store. We also run two anti virus packages on that particular PC, but we did not have it setup to scan the file before allowing it to run. The virus was sophisticated enough and we were obviously not sophisticated enough in the defenses we had in place to prevent the machine from being infected. Lesson learned.

As you can see from the net, there are numerous people that were infected. I think that the level of trust that we give a vendor comes in waves. In this case, with facebook, my wife trusted that nothing would come throgh her inbox that would be suspect. I cannot recall ever getting a single piece of spam in my inbox on facebook. Can you?

Thanks though, Kevin

@ ozinca and j and v. I agree a UPS would definitely be a great piece to this puzzle, but we, WHS, could do more work to put additional contingencies in place for these sorts of scenarios to prevent data loss on the server.

Windows Home Server Saves Another User

x(perts)64 — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:24:15 GMT

As I was rebuilding my main workstation again (life running pre-beta OS's is always fun), I was very

re: Facebook Trojan Virus... Not a problem if you have a Windows Home Server.

frazpro — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:02:18 GMT

I've just got into the WHS having taken advantage of a 120 day demo disk from MS. So far so good and I'm quite impressed with the system.

I've moved our shared media onto the box and duplicated it across the volumes in there.

My concern is, if I lose the boot volume of the WHS, can I recover it and then get access to my backup data? The installation was all but unattended in terms of setting up the partitions and installing the system. If the boot volume goes and I have to resinstall, I cant see anyway of getting access back to my backup data including the shared volumes.

Am I worrying unnecessarily?

re: Facebook Trojan Virus... Not a problem if you have a Windows Home Server.

Kevin Beares — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:55:24 GMT

Frazpro,

If you have a OEM version of Windows Home Server and you lose the primary partition, recovery is built-in to perform a server resinstallation. Depending on how the failure occurred, yes, you could lose your backup database. As Stormy1954 pointed out above, At your own risk you could try the beta WHS Backup Database-Backup Add-In at http://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2066

Thanks,

Kevin