Windows Home Server Saves Another User
As I was rebuilding my main workstation again (life running pre-beta OS's is always fun), I was very much appreciating the simplicity of Windows Home Server. I have my main workstation set up as an 80 GB OS drive (C:) and data drives of D: and E:. Whenever I install a new build on the computer, I add it to my Windows Home Server list of computers and never think about backups again. If I do something ill-advised (aka, stupid) and blow up the install? Simple, put in the recovery CD, boot from it, and in under 35 minutes I am back to yesterday's state. Completely. WHS has just replaced my munged partition with a known good image and I have nothing else to do but use it. This set it and forget it simplicity is simply awesome. A friend of mine, Kevin Beares, just had his wife's computer "owned" by the latest Facebook Trojan. He was able to completely recover her system in under an hour (laptop drives are slower!) and be certain that there wasn't any trace of the trojan on her machine. Another user saved by WHS.
I've said this before, in various places. Windows Home Server is simply the best backup program on the market today. Full stop. I like some of it's other features, but I can get them from other places and in other ways. I run Windows Small Business Server (SBS) at home, so I don't need the remote access features. And since I have a server here, I keep most of my documents on that main server, not on WHS. But WHS is the first line of backup for that SBS box, and the backup for all the workstations on my network. And it's saved me several times already when I've had hardware or other failures.
Charlie.