Over the years I’ve collected a lot of data, music, photos and documents mainly. Thousands and thousands of photos, thousand of music files, and not so many documents, but still important nonetheless. For the longest time I just kept them all stored on an external hard disk. This worked alright, until the disk starting having overheating issues, and my wife wanted to be able to access the photos and music from her computer.
Along comes Windows Home Server, if you’ve never heard of it, don’t fear, a lot of people haven’t, but you really should check it out. Windows Home Server allows you to keep all your important information in one single repository, accessible from anywhere within your home network, and even from outside of that Network if you setup the remote access capabilities.
But WHS doesn’t just provide access to files, it will also allow you to configure user accounts, with various levels of access to files, provide automated backups of all the computers on your networking running Windows, and much more.
You can purchase a Windows Home Server machine from many different retailers, including Amazon.Though you don’t even have to buy a machine, you can simply purchase the operating system and set it up on an existing machine. That is the approach I took, I used my old desktop machine and configured it to by my home server.
Up until last week it had 4.5tb of storage space available using a total of 4 different hard disks. This worked out well, as with Home Server you can configure the software to keep duplicate copies of the data stored on the home server, basically mirroring the contents of your home server across multiple drives, that way if one of your hard disks fails, your data should be safe on one of the other hard drives. (warning, you must configure this option on specific folders, I don’t believe it is configured by default)
Well I got to test this feature out. The other evening Natalie and I were watching TV when all of a sudden it sounded like there was a dog growling in my office, our two dogs were in the living room with us though, and then immediately heard this sound. I came running into my office and found the sound coming from my Windows Home Server, I immediately powered it off, fearing that I had lost a drive. I let it sit over night, and then the next morning tried powering up the machine, same result, dogs growling, Tasmanian devil going nuts in the cabinet the machine sits in.
I spent the next couple of days in fear, fearful that I lost images and music, as the Photos and Music folders were showing up in WHS as failing, I also had some file conflicts, which tracing those down showed me that I was indeed missing some music and photos. I spent two days trying to swap out internals from the bad drive, into another drive of the same make/model. Before I could take that other drive out of the WHS though I put in an additional 3tb of drives, two 1.5tb drives, so that I could “remove” the existing drive without losing the data on that drive.
Windows Home Server manages the addition and removal of drives from the pool of available storage space, so I was able to remove the remaining good 750gb Seagate drive, and WHS transferred all the contents from that drive to the four 1.5 TB drives now in the machine. After removing the good 750 I took the internals out, and swapped in the internals from the bad 750 drive. The bad drive failed because the wheel that the disk platters mount to came loose in the drive, and from what I can tell this can’t happen without an extreme amount of force. So I took the platters, heads, and board from the bad drive, and put them into the good drive’s case, onto the wheel that was fixed in the proper place.
I put the drive back into my Home Server and fired her up, it was still noisy, but not near as noisy as the sounds were from the previous days. I remote desktop’d into the WHS (home server machines generally don’t get hooked up to a monitor, simply a power connection and Ethernet connection are all that is necessary) to check and see if Windows could see the replaced 750 drive. Unfortunately it couldn’t. The drive was still missing. I had spent two days trying to salvage this drive, and without any luck decided to just tell WHS to “remove” the missing drive from the pool. This ran all last night, and when I got up this morning WHS was reporting 5.4TB of space (for some reason it only sees 1.34tb from each of the 1.5tb drives). I powered down WHS and removed the 750 drive. I powered the machine back up, and started looking around.
It looks, as of right now (knock on wood), that all of my files are intact. Even though the files were missing before, it looks like that was just an issue because WHS was looking for them on a drive that it couldn’t find, they were duplicated elsewhere, and the process of removing that missing drive from the Pool allowed Windows Home Server to correct for the missing files. Hopefully things continue to run smoothly! As of right now I have 1.4tb of data on the machine (not including any backups from my desktop computers), an additional 1.4tb duplicated, leaving me roughly 3tb of free space, or really 1.5tb of usable space as any new data will also be duplicated.
This whole process got me thinking, what happens if I lose all four drives in the Windows Home Server machine? Well, as of right now I would be up a creek as I wouldn’t have any way to recover them. So the next process is for me to figure out a backup solution for that machine. There are add-ons for Windows Home Server that will backup the machine to locations such as Amazon’s S3, which is a cloud based storage network. That would be the ideal backup scenario, put it all out in the cloud and not have to worry about it, but due to the fact that I have 1.4tb of data, the monthly costs for Amazon S3 would be $210, EVERY MONTH! A cheaper scenario would be to go out and buy a 2TB external hard disk every month and back my WHS up to that.
While that would be cheaper, it still isn’t feasible, so what I am likely going to do is purchase two 2TB external drives, and do a monthly backup to each drive, every other month. Storing one drive at the Neighbor’s house, or in a safe deposit box somewhere. That way if our house ever burns down I still at least have the data from my WHS backed up on a drive that isn’t stored in the same location as the machine itself.
So, what is your plan? How do you backup files? One thing you might check out, if you have a minimal number of files that you are concerned about backing up. Check out www.mesh.com, a service from Microsoft that allows you to synchronize data across multiple devices. Part of Mesh is to offer this data synch to the cloud, but with a limit of 5gb. I used Mesh when writing the DotNetNuke Book earlier this year with Patrick Renner. We were able to share folders for the book, and when I finished up a chapter it would synchronize to his machine, saving us the effort of having to email files back and forth and worry about which version was most current. The same would happen when he finished up or made changes to a chapter. I also use Mesh to store some important documents (unshared with Pat of course), that get saved to my Desktop, Laptop, and into the Cloud. That way I can access them from anywhere in the world with a web browser. I obviously can’t use Mesh for my music or photos due to the amount of content I have, but it works great for keeping my documents backed up.