I've had Windows Home Server installed on a PC that sits in a closet within my office for about 3 months now. It sits there quietly with just a network cable and power cable plugged into and hums away unnoticed every day. It has performed the scheduled daily backups for my family desktop PC and the Media Center in the bedroom. I run Vista Ultimate on both PCs, and outside of a few false notifications which required server reboots or a login to the console to figure out - it has been almost perfect.
Last weekend my hard drive on my family PC finally died. I had ignored the loud warning signs for months, and despite warnings, hangs, unresponsiveness, and a few short-lived no boot situations I turned a blind eye to this for months due to my busy schedule. On Saturday the issue could no longer be ignored.
Let me first say that when I setup and configured my Windows Home Server I was quite pleased with the convenience and as a result I did very little to educate myself on how it really worked or what I would have to do if I ever had to rely on it. This was my first mistake.
Learning #1:
When replacing a failed hard disk on your desktop PC ensure the capacity is equal to or greater than that hard disk.
My disk that failed was 500 GB, however I was only using about 180 GB. Typically I would buy a new hard disk online to reap greater savings but given the circumstances I opted to buy a 320 GB drive that was on sale at a local retailer.
After installing the disk I booted from the Home Server Restore CD, encountered problem #2 (see below), and then found out that based on the way Windows Home Server restores your disk I should have purchased the same size disk as I had previously. This is because Home Server performs the backup at the cluster level so upon restoring it restores both "used" and "unused" clusters. This is actually a really good thing and has quite a few benefits - if you care to read about the nitty gritty details check out: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=196fe38c-df20-4e19-92ca-6bda7bec3ecb&DisplayLang=en
Unfortunately as a result of this, I opted to do a clean install of Vista Ultimate on my family PC and then just manually restore my personal files from my Home Server. Sure this meant I would have to reinstall all of my apps, but for whatever reason I find it refreshing to do a fresh start on a system. I am an avid gamer and I often end up with dozens of games installed, of which many have not been played in months.
Learning #2:
When searching for your Home Server from the Restore CD, it may fail if you have named your Home Server something other than SERVER.
When setting up my Home Server originally I named the server based on a common naming schema for my networked PCs. This is perfectly fine, but as a result I had to manually search for my Home Server based on its computer name.
Learning #3:
After performing a nice, new, clean install and configuring your system - defragment your disk, then do a manual PC backup to your Home Server, and lock the backup when it is complete.
Having done a brand spanking new install of Vista I wanted to be able to get back to that pristine state should I ever have a failure again. So I installed my base apps that my family use daily, configured our user accounts, and installed all updates from Windows Update. Note: If you have installed Office remember to opt into Microsoft Update so you get all of the Office Updates as well.
The next thing I did was defragment my hard disk. Because Home Server is backing up at the cluster level I wanted to ensure that the disk was defragmented. This would ensure a nice clean, quick backup, and also avoid a longer backup cycle when the system does do disk defragmentation later in the month on the automatic schedule.
Learning #4:
When manually restoring files from a Home Server backup, you may want to temporarily disable your anti-virus.
After all of this I then began my work of manually restoring my user files from my prior backup (remember that failed disk). This was a fairly easy process as I had previously implemented folder redirection and syncing of offline files for all of my user accounts when I initially setup my Home Server. I'll write in more detail about this on another day and another post.
I found that when my anti-virus was running the manual restore process was brutal. My system was crawling due to the amount of processor cycles the anti-virus was churning. Explorer would be almost completely unresponsive at times. After snoozing the anti-virus monitoring everything throttled up and it was a much smoother process.
Conclusion
With all of that said, I am very pleased with the overall process. Granted I hit a few bumps in the road through this learning journey, there was nothing that was a blocking issue and the end result is what I had hoped for. The great news is that despite a failed disk I was able to replace, setup, and restore in only a few hours time with no data loss and for that I am very happy with my Home Server. The simplicity in setup, the convenience of the backups, and overall self-maintenance outweighs any minor weaknesses in the platform.
