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Expert guide to Windows Home Server

Posted on 13 Nov 2007 at 15:42

The Shared Folders tab shows the space used by each folder, its duplication setting and its status - essentially whether the duplication has been successful. This is the place to create, delete or rename folders, as well as restrict permissions on a user-by-user basis. The nature of the disk structure means that using Windows Explorer to administer folders on WHS itself is fraught with pitfalls, unless you stick to the \\SERVER network path.

You can also call up a history graph for each folder, plotting space used over time. Clicking on the Server Storage tab shows the physical hard disks installed, with their capacity and status, along with options to remove, add or repair any disks listed. A pie chart helpfully shows the space division between shared folders, backup and duplicated folders.

Drive Extender

Some of the new services added to WHS are unique among its Windows brethren. Drive Extender, for example, enables all the hard disks in the device to be lumped into one storage pool. As such, there are no drive letters visible from the client - just folders. Although that sounds rather like RAID, it isn't, since the disks remain addressable through Explorer when working on the server locally - you do this at your peril, however.

This system is also dynamic - add a disk and it will be shown in Home Server as a "non-storage drive" until you run a wizard, at which point it's formatted and added to the pool. Similarly, you can use a remove disk wizard, which will attempt to rearrange the data to make it redundant, at which point you'll then be able to physically remove or replace it.

You can use this process to add as many internal or external USB/FireWire drives as you like. However, because they're formatted when they're added to the storage pool, you'll need temporary storage even if you're simply migrating data. Once removed, you can't simply reattach the drive to the pool without formatting it, either, or read it from a standard Windows environment.

Folder duplication

Although terabyte-capacity hard disks are now available - arguably sufficient for most storage needs - it's much better to use two or more physical disks in a WHS, thanks to its Folder Duplication feature. This ensures that any given folder is copied to at least two separate spindles, protecting it from the physical failure of either. In an ideal world, each folder would have this enabled, but you can disable it if you have capacity restraints. When out of space to fully duplicate, the health of the folder will be shown as "failing", although this will automatically correct itself if capacity returns.

Backup

You can map your storage history over weeks, months and years.

Arguably, the most useful feature of WHS is its ability to automatically back up all the PCs on your network. Simply specify the time frame (by default between 12am and 6am), and the entire PC will be imaged to the server using a "shadow copy", so you can carry on working.

Cunningly, the imaging works on a low-level basis - right down to the hard disk cluster, in fact. WHS stores each cluster value only once, simply mapping where the same cluster is found elsewhere. In practice, when that's applied to several PCs all running the same OS or sharing similar files, the space saving becomes significant - we've seen Home Server store well over a terabyte of backups in 250GB. Subsequent backups involve only the clusters that have changed and are significantly quicker.