Windows Home Server
- Thread starter cavemanoc
- Start date
Yup, about 50gb per disk.
Luckily at present I don't have many Blu Ray disk and I also switch off duplication for the folders with them in.
But a 1TB disk can store 20Blu Rays or 200 DVD's. I'm working on the premise that Moores law will keep storage size and costs above my needs.
Taff
Luckily at present I don't have many Blu Ray disk and I also switch off duplication for the folders with them in.
But a 1TB disk can store 20Blu Rays or 200 DVD's. I'm working on the premise that Moores law will keep storage size and costs above my needs.
Taff
I wouldn't swear to this as it's an assumption based on a rebuild I carried out.
Whatever happens you will have to re-install WHS itself as an operating system so that it picks up the correct drivers for the m/b etc. So any addins will also have to be re-installed.
But the shares that are on the drives will not be lost if you take those drives and plug them back into the new machine.
The reason for this deduction is that I've had to rebuild the WHS from scratch a couple of times once using a new hard drive for the OS and all I did was put the WHS disk in the rebuilt PC and then reinstalled and everything was still there.
Note :- I didn't change the motherboard/chip/ram, but as WHS is server based software that shouldn't cause an issue.
Taff
Whatever happens you will have to re-install WHS itself as an operating system so that it picks up the correct drivers for the m/b etc. So any addins will also have to be re-installed.
But the shares that are on the drives will not be lost if you take those drives and plug them back into the new machine.
The reason for this deduction is that I've had to rebuild the WHS from scratch a couple of times once using a new hard drive for the OS and all I did was put the WHS disk in the rebuilt PC and then reinstalled and everything was still there.
Note :- I didn't change the motherboard/chip/ram, but as WHS is server based software that shouldn't cause an issue.
Taff
So one should start a re-install with ALL the storage drives and the (new) system drive connected?
Soldato
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Out of interest, does WHS support any form of clustering or machine replication? I have 2 identical computers here and wondering if It might be worth investigating putting say a few TB in each one and setting up some kind of cluster/replication system?
Have a read of the following it might help with a partial answer
http://social.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/whssoftware/thread/96a23e09-3433-455e-8c2d-fa06b8827f9a
Soldato
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MMM, kind of 'no' is the answer it seems. I guess if you want clustering from MS you have to pony up for 'Enterprise'
That's what I'm going to try - plug all drives into new machine and insert dvd - cross fingers and perform the usual ritual chicken dance
Associate
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WHS gurus, I have a desktop PC with Win 7HP, MacbookPro and the wife has a Samsung NC10 (runing XP Home) and a spare machine that I used to test Win7 RC before I bought it.
First things first is it possible for the Macbook to communicate witih the WHS? Eg the Win 7 desktop has all my digital photos and music. It would all be backed up to the WHS, can the MBP access it (at home and ove the internet) and can I back up the MBP to the WHS too?
First things first is it possible for the Macbook to communicate witih the WHS? Eg the Win 7 desktop has all my digital photos and music. It would all be backed up to the WHS, can the MBP access it (at home and ove the internet) and can I back up the MBP to the WHS too?
WHS is at its heart a Windows 2003 fileserver, so your MBP should have no problems browsing the shares.
Personally, I would put all media onto the server and use that as a central store.
The backups are run using the WHS Connector software. There isn't a mac version, so you couldn't use that for backups. However, there is nothing stopping you from using the mac backup software to backup that machine over the network to a share on the server.
Soldato
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My computer empire is growing, as well as my main rig I have my old rig now converted into a Media PC and also 2 other PCs in the house it is time for a server.
I am torn between a NAS and building a cheap WHS rig as NAS are so expensive. I would like one that supports 4 or 5 disks and RAID.
The problem is with a NAS I can't use it for downloading at night or other stuff where as with a server it is a full computer which is much more versatile. Maybe even full windows server for Exchange etc.
Does the full server have these WHS backup features?
So I am not sure, WHS looks interesting but I am not sure if I really need any of the features they sound like gimmicks.
I can format a PC and reinstall manually so don't need any of this "imaging".
The keeping of multiple folders on different computers backed up does indeed seem very handy and I could definitely use this. It is a pain having to manually copy stuff over the network.
But my main worry is the way it merges hard drives together, it sounds cool but it means you can't use RAID which means the only way to make data safe is to mirror it which uses 2x space.
Can you get normal RAID to work?
I am torn between a NAS and building a cheap WHS rig as NAS are so expensive. I would like one that supports 4 or 5 disks and RAID.
The problem is with a NAS I can't use it for downloading at night or other stuff where as with a server it is a full computer which is much more versatile. Maybe even full windows server for Exchange etc.
Does the full server have these WHS backup features?
So I am not sure, WHS looks interesting but I am not sure if I really need any of the features they sound like gimmicks.
I can format a PC and reinstall manually so don't need any of this "imaging".
The keeping of multiple folders on different computers backed up does indeed seem very handy and I could definitely use this. It is a pain having to manually copy stuff over the network.
But my main worry is the way it merges hard drives together, it sounds cool but it means you can't use RAID which means the only way to make data safe is to mirror it which uses 2x space.
Can you get normal RAID to work?
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But there is no need for RAID in a WHS setup.
You just choose what folder to duplicate, and it automatically copies it to another drive to keep a redundant copy. It will not keep folders in a different PC backed up, it will back up the whole PC. I save everything to my WHS and nothing to indivual PC's. The whole lot is accessible no matter where I am or what PC/Laptop or wherever I happen to be.
The whole point is that it is simple and easy. It really is! I have had 1 hard drive failure and WHs handled it well. I just switched off, removed drive, told it I had, and it automatically rebuilt itself.
You just choose what folder to duplicate, and it automatically copies it to another drive to keep a redundant copy. It will not keep folders in a different PC backed up, it will back up the whole PC. I save everything to my WHS and nothing to indivual PC's. The whole lot is accessible no matter where I am or what PC/Laptop or wherever I happen to be.
The whole point is that it is simple and easy. It really is! I have had 1 hard drive failure and WHs handled it well. I just switched off, removed drive, told it I had, and it automatically rebuilt itself.
I thought that wasn't recommended, or was that just something that was a problem before the first update?
That was fixed in PP1. And was only in special circumstances anyway! Running a particular version of a MS office app, while editing a certain filetype or something like that. It was widely reported (As all Microsoft glitches always are!) but a rare series of events.
I know you can backup shares to USB, but can you backup the 20GB System partition?
Has anyone had the system drive fail and done a full recovery? From what I have read you have to reinstall WHS onto that drive, and then recreate all your shares... which requires you to remember the layout of all your shares.
Would be ideal if WHS could back itself up in the same way it backs up other PCs...
This is my understanding as well...
However, my understanding is that the Shares will still be intact (after the reinstall) so that they don't need to be recreated...(assuming that it is the SYS HDD that the problem is with and not one of the Shares HDDs).