Microsoft announced a new product called Windows Home Server at CES in Las Vegas early this year. I read about it just a few days later and immediatly thought “This is what I have been searching for”. The 20 Februari 2007 the public beta program was announced and I joined as soon as I knew about it.
I would like to tell you a little bit about my background first, just to let you understand my viewpoint. I’m 40+ old, married and have two kids which are 10 and 13 years old. We have a varying numbers of computers at home which serves both practical purposes as well as pleasure. You problably know what I think of: Banking, shoping, reading news, managing photos, listen to music, email, searching Internet for information and playing games. I work as IT architect at a company with global presence and have a little twist towards security. My wife works at a kindergarten. And - I manage all of the home computers!
But why Windows Home Server?
The short anwser is: I work soo much with computers that I don’t want to waste my time managing our home computers in stead of spending it with my family. I do think Windows Home Server can help me with this. Maybe not during the beta but when the product is released and available. Take a look on the feature list:
Client backup - this could motivate the whole thing in my eyes. Think about it: Knowing that your home computers are regulary backed up without you having to care about it. I already used the restore once and I just love it. It took me half an hour to restore one PC instead of days…
Centralized storage of files - Solves my forever existing problem with knowing where to find photos, music and software that we have. Not to meantion that the computers becomes interchangeble. If one computer is busy I just take another! The data is avilable!
Redundant disk storage - the centralized disk storage can be duplicated automatically. A disk crash on the server does not have to be fatal.
Accessing my files and computers from the Internet - this is a tricky one. I’m not so found of this feature, maybe because the security twist I have at work. But hopefully this can be disabled. On the other hand: It could be nice to let my parents in law access photos over Internet instead of trying to fit the photos in far to small email limits.
There are some other features but theese are the one that matters most to me. And all of them are packaged to be easy to manage.
/Christer
