A New Kind of Home Computer: Windows Home Server Preview
by Ryan Smith on September 4, 2007 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
WHS As A Backup Suite, Cont
As for restoring data, WHS comes with two options. The first is the traditional per-file restore, which can only be handled by a client. When a user/client wants to restore a file, they will pick the date/backup from which they want to restore the file, at which point the connector software will mount a dynamically-generated volume that is the contents of the client as of that backup. At this point the user can copy over files from the backup volume to their hard drive.
For a more complete restore, such as in the case of a catastrophic failure or those looking to use WHS as an image backup server, WHS ships with a live-restore CD. When the restore CD is inserted into a computer, the affected machine can connect to the WHS server and select a whole backup to restore. Since the operating system is included in the backup, it is also included in the restore, returning the machine to the same state it was in as of the backup. This process does however wipe the client's hard drive in the process, so it's not something that can be used leisurely. Power users that will be using it as a way to image and restore machines will especially appreciate the ability to restore to volumes of arbitrary size, and while Microsoft isn't pushing the imaging ability hard, it's one the best features of WHS.
There are a few caveats with the backup features of WHS that bear mentioning however. First and foremost only machines running Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista x86 can be backed up. Older versions of Windows are not supported, and more surprisingly x64 versions of Windows are not supported. The WHS development team has cited the need to write drivers for the backup/restore abilities as the reason for the latter limitation, as they did not have the time to write a good set of drivers for both x86 and x64, so x64 support is not included for now. Unfortunately we don't have a good idea when such support will arrive; the development team for WHS is working on writing a version of the software for x64, but they are not saying when it might be ready.
Hardware constraints also need to be considered. Backups are transfer intensive, so anything less than a gigabit Ethernet link will cause the network to be the bottleneck. This is especially problematic for wireless links, which under 802.11g are practically capped to less than 6MB/sec (and realistically top out at under 4MB/sec), a fraction of the transfer rate of a hard drive. Microsoft highly recommends at least a 100Mb Ethernet link (forgoing a recommendation for wireless entirely), but wireless will work at the cost of being especially slow when WHS needs to do another full backup because it is ready to throw out the old one.
Last, there is the issue of doing backups at convenient times. A machine needs to be fully-on to be backed up, and WHS only has a limited ability to deal with AWOL machines and deal with machines that aren't currently on; it (or rather the connector) can wake up sleeping computers, but does not have a wake-on-LAN feature for waking up computers that are shut off entirely. An add-on exists that can handle this, but the only reliable way of backing up a machine at night is to leave it on or put it to sleep instead of turning it off. Sleeping however can be more problematic on an enthusiast computer than an OEM-built one.
With that said, it's very clear that Microsoft has put a lot of thought and their best technologies into the backup feature of WHS. Although this isn't a round up where we can adequately and fairly compare all the major backup software suites, we will say that we're very impressed with what WHS can do here. The backup features alone can sell WHS if the price is right as is the number of machines.
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Iketh - Sunday, September 16, 2007 - link
My current computer will be my file server/backup device in the future. My question is will WHS take advantage of 2gb of ram or should i make use of it in my new system and just throw a 512 or 1024 single channel stick in this one?FrankM - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
Had this idea for a time, posted it at various forums, and now I see it implemented - glad to see that this feature made it to implementation.LoneWolf15 - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
I found this out testing the Beta and RC. Using a Foxconn nForce 6150-chipset board, even with BIOS support for RAID 5 and drivers, I couldn't get it working. MS blamed it on the drivers, but essentially said "Why would you want to run RAID 5 when Windows Home server does (yada yada yada...)?"
I know darn well why I want to run RAID 5...because some of my media files are important enough that I don't want to lose them, and RAID 5 is a far more secure way than WHS' methods. I really wish MS had worked harder on this part, because it makes deciding between purchasing WHS and staying with my 25-CAL copy of Win2k3 Server Enterprise (gotten at an MS conference) a much harder decision.
I want Windows Home Server, eventually. I'm just not sure I want the first version.
tynopik - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
> RAID 5 is a far more secure way than WHS' methodshow so?
i believe in the real world you will find this is not the case (unless you're using truly enterprise level hardware everywhere, and no nForce RAID is NOT enterprise level)
n0nsense - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
nForce (i'm not sure, but i think there is intel's chipset based MoBos with raid 5) raid still better in terms of stability, redundancy and performance then any soft raid.think what will happen if your WHS will crush unrecoverably.
how will you restore your data ?
tynopik - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
> think what will happen if your WHS will crush unrecoverably.how will you restore your data ?
pull the drive out
stick it another system
copy files off
what will happen if your raid5 gets corrupted? how will you recover data?
pull out all drives
send to data recovery specialists
pay $$$$$
ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
If one drive die, you just replace it, other problems can mostly be fixed by the controller/software rebuidling the stuff, and if not, raid5 has a more or less standard way to be implmented, so you can easily use recovery tools. If that fails, you can always fall back to your backup.That beeing said, I do agree that onboard-raids are crap, I would much rather use a "pure" software-implementation, like mdadm or win2k3s implementation. Mobo-raids have had a horrible track-record data-security-wise.
Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Win2K3S costs about $750 OEM with 5 CALs, is considerably more difficult to administer than WHS, and does not include the backup client developed specifically for WHS.No linux-based implementation will give you SIS (Single Instance Storage) which will, in a typical home usage scenario, save you far more space than RAID5 over RAID1 could ever hope to.
ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Yes, win2k3 is an entirely diffrent product, but I don't see why that makes the need for software-raid5 in WHS any less. If anything you are arguing for implmenting software-raid5 in WHS. It's built on win2k3 and should be able to make a raid the same way w2k3 can.Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
As an example, you can look at Intel SS4000-E NAS. It runs Linux kernel 2.6 with software RAID5 as one of the options on an Intel IOP80219 processor clocked at 600MHz. Read performance on a 4-drive RAID5 caps out at 12MB/s on large files at 6MB/s on small files; write performance is approximately 7MB/s and 1.5MB/s respectively.