After months of semi-public beta testing, Microsoft’s Windows Home Server is finally arriving in retail. HP’s MediaSmart Server is up first and the companies are offering live informational webcasts – including one today at 4PM EST:
In addition to a live demonstration, consumer technology industry experts such as Rob Enderle/The Enderle Group, Rick Doherty/Envisioneering, Paul Thurrott/SuperSite for Windows, and Ed Bott/ZDNet will discuss how the explosion in media consumption is driving the need for this type of solution. Representatives from HP and Microsoft will also be on-hand to respond directly to audience questions related to either the HP MediaSmart Server or the new Windows Home Server software.
NewTeeVee wonders if Home Server will become the digital hub Microsoft intends, and I also have questions. Is the mainstream ready for network-attached storage and does Microsoft provide the plug and play simplicity needed to make it fly? And don’t forget consumer friendly Apple waiting in the wings – they’ve got ZFS and Time Machine backups need a home…
don’t count on ZFS quite yet… its having its own problems…
http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/netapp-sues-sun.html
I kinda want one, but seems likely it wouldn’t quite meet my needs. I’d like to have a media PC with all my media on it, and also to run various taxing programs I’d like to get off my main PC. Problem is those taxing things include stuff like TivoToGo, which I’m guessing won’t run on WHS. Or a torrent client. Or iTunes to download the latest podcasts, or …
Problem is I don’t think WHS really has a user interface, you just access it via a web page. But I’m not sure. Obviously need to find out more about it. In many ways its very appealing.
I’ve been running WHS for the past couple months as part of the RC testing. It keeps all my media in check and served up to Tivo and my xbox 360, runs TivoToGo, utorrent, and works with iTunes. The connector program on the client computers gives you complete control over everything. Glenn, you and everyone else have absolutely no reason not to get it. It’s fantastic.
And, if you don’t like HP’s box or any of the other retail boxes you can get the OEM copy and build a custom machine for it.
John, have you installed or are you aware of any software to allow automated/scheduled network backup to the cloud? I’m interested, if I can relatively simply have WHS dump certain directories off (ssh, ftp, whatever) to my web hosting server on a regular basis. I also wonder if the file system plays nice in a multi-OS household since most of my digital photos live on the Mac these days. I used a Buffalo NAS (Linux) for awhile, and being cross platform meant separate storage areas – was sort of a kludge. It also had a noisy whining fan, which is why I actually dumped it.
Actually, it looks like the TTG problem has already been solved. Its called Tivo Publisher for WHS and you can find it here:
http://durfee.net/software/2007/07/tivo-publisher-for-whs.html
Seems like its still under development. The comments are encouraging, but whether it works with only MPEG files or all of the formats TTG supports (in particular Xvid and DivX) I can’t tell yet.
There’s also a uTorrent client, see:
http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1717779&SiteID=50
You can find out about the “plugins” available at:
http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/windows-home-server-add-ins/
I know that there are a few third-party online backup options that work with WHS (I forget their names at the moment). I would think that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult since what you describe sounds similar to how the Photosync add-on works with flickr. Remember too, it’s built on Server 2k3 which makes it remarkably flexible.
As far as non-MS OSs, it depends on the features you want to use. WHS won’t backup and restore non-Windows or non supported OSs but it should be possible to connect to the shares. One thread on the forum did say that you can configure a Mac to backup to a folder pretty easily. http://forums.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver/default.aspx?siteid=50