This isn’t a new product, it’s been out for around 2 years now but I’ve only just recently started to use it. The idea behind Windows Home Server is that it sits innocuously in your home permanently switched on. Every night it will power up all your home computers (Windows based ones that is) and back them up completely. If you accidentally delete a file, all you need to do is open the Home Server Console and restore a backup. All the restored files appear as a new drive on your PC so you can drag and drop them to wherever you want. Taking the backups a stage further, if your PC itself fails to boot, Windows is corrupted or maybe you clicked on a dodgy web site link then fear not… bung the Windows Home Server Rescue Disc in the CD drive, boot the PC and it’ll connect to your home server and within a few minutes (10 when I tested it) your PC will be back to where you left it before you installed that free Britney Spears screensaver that seemed wipe your hard drive.

The second use for the server is a glorified file storage system. Instead of storing your personal files on your PC, store them on your Windows Home Server. By default you get a folder for your personal files, one for photos, one for videos, one for music and one for recorded TV (for another story…). So I lumped a 1TB hard drive in the server and transferred all the data on the NAS to the server. Note that in my screenshot that Replication is off, if you have more than one hard drive in then the server will automatically make sure that a copy of your data exists on at least more than physical drive, so should a drive fail you don’t lose your data. A remote access feature also exists so you can log on to the server from pretty much any internet connection and access your files, and even remote control your PCs back home.  Hard drive capacity is broken down by folder so you can easily see how much you are using, and there are useful pie-chart breakdowns should you be interested. Media streaming is pretty decent too, certainly no worse than the Linkstation but disappointingly lacking in customisation. When you connect to the server from a media streamer (such as the PS3) you get a confusing breakdown asking if you want to search by artist, album, title, etc… When you organise things in sensible folders anyway that functionality is useless and untidy – I always select the ‘folders’ option so it would have been nice to be able to remove the unwanted ones.

If that’s not enough for you, then functionality can be expanded through add-ins. All of these are 3rd party and of varying degress of quality, but the essential ones for me so far are the Advanced Admin Console which lets you run any application on the server (useful for sharing printers), a Torrent plugin, and a web customisation plugin for customising the web interface with additional links / content.

Overall I’m very pleased with it…it’s based on Windows Server 2003 and compatible with anything compatible with that OS, but it does miss one significant feature: there is no built in option for backing up your data from the Windows Home Server to another network device. You can plug a usb drive in and manually back data up, but you can’t schedule an automatic backup to your exising NAS without installing additional software and writing / scheduling a couple of scripts. Here’s to hoping that this functionality is added in the future.

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Tags: Gadgets, Windows, Windows Home Server