Anyone Using Windows Home Server?

[Kov-Ice]

I basically back everything up manually between two different systems and one laptop. One of the two systems just serves as the file dump and I use it as the source for media.

Have any thoughts on the ease of using WHS instead?

[Hufigyed]

I used it for while when it was in beta still. Definitely makes it very easy to do backups, you install connector software on up to 10 computers and then it'll automatically wake them up and do backups. Does incremental backups so you can go back to different points in time and it doesn't take up too much room. Can backup everything including OS (like an image) so if the HDD fails in a PC, you simply replace it and boot off a CD or USB memory stick and it'll pull everything from the server and restore it. I had it doing nightly incremental backups so if I ever had a HDD fail I could be back in business in a few hours with everything no more than 24 hours out of date.

Ultimately I decided not to buy it because there were a few things that I didn't like. I can't recall off hand what they all were.
One thing I didn't like was that in order to use the backups you'd have to have to have WHS installed. So if you backed up the server and your house burned down you would need to find a PC to install WHS on to recover the data from the drives you had offsite (It wasn't just NTFS). That was too much hassle for me.
They also removed drive extender which was a feature that let you put different drives you found around your house into the server and it would treat it as one pool and you could tell it to make sure each file is on at least two drives. You could have different size drives and types, it didn't matter.
Also the interface was really sluggish (as if you were using over a slow/high latency internet connection). It's really easy and automatic but also really dumbed down so its easy for a home user and I wanted some of the removed control and features that even Windows 7 has so I ended up just installing Windows 7 Pro on my server.

The removal of the drive extender feature was a big deal breaker for me because whenever I put a bigger drive in a laptop or replace it with a SSD, I'd have a perfectly good extra drive kicking around and with the original WHS you could add it to the pool and it would provide redundancy and/or extra space. The only way to do that with the current version is with RAID but then you want similar size and speed drives and definitely not laptop HDDs. And I can do RAID with any version of windows plus have more control and a better interface.

There are a number of different media sharing features that are quite nice as well including serving the content you want over the net. When you buy it MS gives you a sub domain and then you access content that you make available from that address.

So it is really easy and you don't have to do anything manually (and thus forget) but it has its quirks.

[Panama Red]

Yup, I'm still using it, Kov. Did the beta testing for MS and bought the licensed package when it first became available. I use it as a file server for the most part as I access files from any of 6 computers in the house. Only three are being backed up by WHS and on the one occassion I tried to re-image a Windows 7 machine from WHS, it didn't work. Haven't had time to mess with it to find the issue. The problem was with the MBR making the drive non-bootable. Other than that, the system has worked flawlessly.

[Tin]

WHS would work nicely for your purposes. Theres a few other things it can do as well, such as letting you access your files from over the internet and such. Ive run WHS in a virtual machine on my server just to play around with it, it has a nice set it and forget it interface. I use Linux on my home server, as its a Swiss Army knife of sorts.

[Kov-Ice]

I think another main reason for my looking into it is so that I can limit access to others. Both my grade-school kids are getting old enough that the could goof some things up if they click around too much. Was hoping that WHS would allow me to create user accounts for them that would restrict certain activities. Are there plenty of options for user accounts like that?

[Panama Red]

Yup, unless you sign into a recognized server account, you won't have access to server files. And you can restrict any user's files on the server. Personally, I don't have others in the house to restrict so I use the same password and user name to login to my server as I use on the computers. That way I have access to server files without having to perform an additional login.