Archive for April 27th, 2010
Speaking of ‘Vail’
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
Microsoft released a beta today. From preliminary information, it looks like they’ve addressed most of my gripes with Windows Home Server 1.0. Interesting new features –
1) The ability to backup the entire WHS to a remote drive, at scheduled times. That’s nice for snapshotting the whole setup all at once.
2) Scheduled backups of Shared Folders. 1.0 supported quasi-raid style duplication of shared folders, but not regular backups – that was a feature limited to the PCs on your network. It’s nice they’ve integrated the content on the server into the nightly backups mechanism.
3) Shadow copy – real time backups of important areas of your file system on computers in your home. Very nice, I can think of a few areas (Documents, Mail, Desktop, my mozilla patches folder, etc.) that I’d like to have this for. Nightly backups are great, real-time backups for certain areas of your file system are kick ass. This should also (hopfully) integrate in with the existing Shadow Copy features built into Vista and Win7.
4) Simplified setup and configuration for the average Joe, with fine grained control for those that need it.
One bummer, Windows Media Center is not built-in in this rev.. That’s unfortunate, but not a deal killer. Your media can still sit on the the main WHS, and a secondary PC running Windows 7 can serve up the interface and content to the living room. This really isn’t a big deal since kicking into WMC from a 360 will automatically wake the PC serving up Media Center.
All-in-all, looks very promising. Generally speaking, if I knew setting up nightly backups and Shared Folders was as easy as it is with WHS, I would have done this two years ago. It’s really quite impressive, the system is “plug and play” for average users – buy a headless system, plug it in, and your up and running and your data is secure in minutes. Yet for power users like myself who just can’t help but want to get into things and tweak the crap out of them, the options are endless. Very cool.
