Microsoft Discontinues Windows Home Server

[joutlaw]

After having many issues with my 3 yeard old HP ex485, I made the jump from WHS v1 to WHS 2011. I ended up getting DrivePool based off recommendations on this forum and haven't looked back. WHS 2011 is much more refined. I am really liking the built-in transcoding versus Twonky in my MSS with v1.

I really hate to see WHS go, but it is a niche market. I work with Windows servers everyday and WHS was the logical choice for home use. I actually have FreeNAS running along side to backup my wife's MacBook with OSX Lion (Time Machines uses AFP in Lion) and backup the C: of the WHS 2011 box (I have to use Server Backup outside of the dashboard because it won't let you backup to network drives). I see a benefit in having both, but not just a NAS. Backups are a big deal to me because I have lost digital content in the past that was not replaceable. I used CloudBerry with WHS v1 and now with 2011.

 

[WT]

The backup database was quite prone to corruption issues, and once any single backup was corrupted the entire database was rendered useless.

Your experience doesn't match mine, that's for sure. Were your failed drives original WHS drives, or ones you added ? I bought my WHS with a 500GB drive and it came with a second 500 to add to it, but I waited until the issues with WHS and multiple drives were ironed out. That was over 5 years ago and those drives are still humming right along (albeit not in the WHS anymore).
I've probably done over 12 full restores over those years, and I have yet to have any full restores complete successfully. I really do think you had some weird hardware issues going on with those drives if not more.

 

[ControlD]

Your experience doesn't match mine, that's for sure. Were your failed drives original WHS drives, or ones you added ?

I didn't have any WHS drives fail, they were drives on client computers that failed. I was unable to restore the images on those clients because the backup database had errors in it for whatever reason. It seems to be a common problem with WHS for some people (the MS boards are full of questions about backup database problems) while others never seemed to have the issue. I assume it must have been some sort of hardware compatibility issue with the SATA controller on my motherboard but questions to MS went unanswered. I had the same issue on both versions of WHS so whatever the issue was it never got resolved. I have since moved on to a better (for me) solution so all is good now and I have never had any data corruption once I moved to free software. Go figure.