I can’t imagine a better topic for a Friday the 13th technology post than servers, storage and backup.
Here in the home office, I’ve been running an HP MediaSmart server for a little over a year and I can honestly say I don’t have a single complain so far. Microsoft may deserve the knocks it gets for a lot of its other software, but Windows Home Server (WHS) was easy to set-up and has worked as promised ever since.
The tiny little HP box is loaded with 2 terabytes of storage that can stream my music and video collection over Cat-6 Ethernet in the house. Paired with Plex in the family room and Boxee in the living room, I can watch or listen to just about anything I own, anywhere, any time. Windows 7 Media Center in the living room even archives live TV that it’s recorded to the HP automatically, effectively giving me a 2TB TiVo HD.
HP’s MediaSmart also comes with client software for Mac and Windows machines to run daily full-system backups. Every laptop, media center and desktop here in the house has a 30-day backup/restore image just in case anything goes wrong. The backups are “bare metal”, meaning that I can restore to a brand-new hard drive on every machine in case of a catastrophic failure.
Keeping so much data on one server started making me nervous, though, even though the HP supports automatic RAID disk layouts for increased data protection. The solution was an add-in provided on the HP Website. A WHS Extension for the MediaSmart series can upload data on a scheduled basis to offsite storage in Amazon’s Simple Storage System (S3) cloud. I get a bill for a couple dollars each month for bandwidth and storage charges from Amazon, but voila! – I have a network in the house that’s nearly as good as the ones I’ve built for my various startups.
I look forward to hearing from anyone who’s doing things differently or better in terms of home networking/backup. I’m also happy to exchange e-mail messages with anyone who wants to contact me with questions about setting-up or running a home or business network.