So my love affair with Windows Home Server has come to an end. Sorry honey, but I'm not putting up with this any longer.
The notorious "
data corruption" problem raised its head again for the second time. Interestingly enough not for any of the reasons listed by Microsoft as why it happens.
This time, I think there was a power outage which corrupted something in the server 2003 boot process resulting in a blue-screen. Annoying but no big deal to reinstall Home Server which largely takes care of itself.
Up came all three of my drives - all data intact, movies played fine, mp3s were good, photos all there. Everything was happy until "load balancing" kicked in whereupon 95% of my of files got trashed. This is off a clean installation - no software from their "blacklist" was involved.
Fortunately I never trusted home server enough to leave anything valuable in its exclusive care, so everything except for a few kids' tv shows is safe.
I just want to say
this was such a cool product! But you can't have an OS that corrupts data... really.
Before I get a gazillion emails saying "you can do that with linux" let me clarify the things it did out of the box:
- Efficient, incremental backups of all windows PCs on the home network, and bare-metal restores
- Remote access to the home server, other PCs, shared files & backups, from the internet
- Your own internet domain name
- Redundant storage specified at folder level
- Add a new drive any time you like to the pool of storage
- Stream multiple feeds of video and audio anywhere in the house
... and probably other things I took for granted. Show me another product that does all that for $200.
So now what?Option 1: I move everything back to Linux like it was 6 months ago.
RAID on linux seems all to complicated for someone who doesn't have hours of hacking time to blow on researching arcane combinations of hardware and the various flavours of Linux RAID. God forbid I actually have to rebuild anything! And I don't trust disk hardware without RAID as I see at least one disk die every year.
Option 2: I try out Solaris with its swanky cool
ZFS file systemThis sounds like a geek's dream but then I have a huge investment in what amounts to a NAS box and nothing else.
Option 3: Merge my storage with a media centre
I'd like to be an early adopter of HD / DVB-T but again I'm a few months ahead of stable drivers for the newer cards and don't have a lot of time for tweaking. And then should I go the MS route with MCE, or back to Linux with MythTV?
Option 4: A "hybrid" option would be to continue with my existing Linux mediaserver and rsync my "big disk" back to another "big disk" on my desktop (Vista) box as a form of poor-man's RAID. This would do while I wait for the Hauppauge 4000 series HD / DVB capture cards to settle into mainstream.
As for backups, I'm going to evaluate the
Acronis range of products as I got used to knowing there was a historical archive of bare-metal-restorable images of my laptop(s) sitting safely at home.
RIP Home Server
Read More
