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Added a backup drive to my Home Server

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Adding a hard drive to Home Server is relatively easy to do.  I followed the simple instructions over at Home Server Hacks (a great site, BTW).

This works fine if you want to add more storage to your server.  But I already have plenty of storage (hey, the box comes with half a terabyte, which is more than I'll need for photo and music files for a very long time).  What I really wanted to do was to use the second drive as a backup drive.  When I selected this option in the wizard, it gave me an error telling me the drive hadn't been partitioned and that I should partition it and reboot the home server.  Weird.  So I ignored that advice.  Instead I added it as a regular storage drive, and Home Server went ahead and partitioned and formatted it automatically.  Then I clicked the "remove" option on the menu, and re-added it as a backup drive.  This time no error.  I guess I didn't need to reboot after all.  No smoke coming from the back of the machine yet...

I also switched on compression on the backup drive.  Maybe the backups are already compressed?  I don't know.  I'll wait and see whether this was a good idea or not.

The main reason I wanted a backup drive within the server is that from now on I won't be storing my files on my PCs.  They'll be centralized on the server, so I can get them from anywhere.  Hence the server needs to be backing itself up.

To make it easier to use the central file server, I moved my "my documents" folder to the server.  To do this, just right-click on your "my documents" icon and open the properties.  Then set the target folder to be an appropriate folder on your home server (in my case \\home-server\Users\Robert).  Windows then migrates all the files over to the new location.

My next home server project is to use the built-in Windows VPN functionality to access the server from anywhere.  That project's on hold since my router doesn't support VPN pass-through (so I've ordered a new one from NewEgg, since I was just looking for an excuse to get a WiFi router with better range anyway...)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2008
    Hmmm. I am a bit wary of storing files on the user folder and working on these files directly - even though WHS PP1 seems to be THE fix for those early corruption problems I would use that as a backup. Talking about backup, the reason to keep the files on your PC is that they will be automatically copied to your home server every night - a backup. If you store the files on your home server only, where's the backup? As for VPN, use Hamachi and don't worry about passthrough... I use Hamachi and I have my Home Server from anywhere I am.

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2008
    I know where you're coming from M, but I don't want a "server" just for backup.  There are much cheaper solutions out there for that.  If I spend $550.00 on a "server" I'm going to be making use of file & print. The second drive is the backup of the first drive, and in theory Home Server takes care of the backup. I tried Hamachi.  It was okay.  Presumably it's an HTTPS relay architecture, although this is just a guess - I haven't actually researched it.  But I'm still going to try getting closer to the metal and making use of the features that are already in the server I bought.