Windows Home Server is misnamed. Few people really want a server for their home. It should be Windows SOHO Server, and Microsoft should market it to micro-businesses like mine - businesses with fewer than ten employees and no IT help. WHS has the features of Windows Server that are most important to these businesses: backup and remote access; and it makes those features dead easy to use.
The backup situation at Seal Rock Research has been adequate but never truly satisfactory. For the last eight years, we've backed up to servers running Samba on various flavors of Unix or Linux. Each PC has a simple batch file that incrementally copies changed or new files from our document directories to the server. Too much of this is manual. Everyone has to remember to launch the batch file, and if Outlook is running the Outlook files don't get backed up. Applications and OS are not backed up, and I have had to rebuild machines a few times. We have never lost a document, but I wanted to improve this situation.
I installed the trial version of Windows Small Business Server on an old PC to try it out. It wanted to take control of my gateway router so I went no farther with that. SBS seems like overkill to me anyway; running my own Exchange server is not on my list of must-dos.
The trial version of Windows Home Server was much more successful. In an hour or so I installed it on an old PC, connected one of our client PC's to it and got a complete image backup.
So When HP started blowing their HP LX 195 out the doors for $199 I was ready. I bought one the first day that price was available at NewEgg. That deal is gone but good deals are still available at Amazon.
The LX 195 is a tiny box with an Atom 230 CPU, 1GB of memory, a 640GB hard drive, and Windows Home Server. It is headless by design, with no video or PS/2 ports on its back panel. In two hours I had it up and running, and installed the connector software on all our PC's and laptops. I left everything turned on, and the next morning our entire network was backed up. This, really, is magic.
I want to setup remote access but there are wrinkles. I have a dual-NAT network. The gateway router has a 10.1.10 internal network that connects to my LAN/wireless router. The LAN router has an internal 192.168.1 network, which all PC's and laptops connect to. Here's a picture:
If the WHS server is on the 10.1.10 network, it can do remote access but not backup; on the 192.168.1 network, it can do backup but not remote access. For now backup is the key application, so I'll leave it on the 192.168.1 network, but this makes me want to flatten my network topology. There are probably lots of ways to do it, but I'm tempted to just burn a public IP so the Linksys can be the only NAT router on my network:
Another wrinkle is storage. We aren't a very data-intensive business, but the initial backup used up over half of the ~600GB the LX195 makes available. The LX195 has only one internal drive bay. Expansion is by adding external drives to the four USB ports on the back. This is OK, but I'd rather not have two pieces of gear where one would do. I don't want to find myself in a space crunch a year or two from now, so I've ordered a 1.5TB drive as a replacement.
But the Storage Central uses the proprietary