Do you backup your computers? No, I’m serious. Do you? Think of all the critical data you take for granted will just be there. Digital photos, finances, music, personal and work documents. What if your hard drive died the next time you were using your computer?

I had been backing up all of our computers using Windows Live OneCare, to a USB drive. But I’ve been reading more and more about how unreliable this ‘cheap’ USB drive I owned was. I started thinking about how obscene it was that I was being ‘cheap’ to protect all of my data, it was really kind of absurd.

I got rid of all our CDs years ago, and ripped all of our music to MP3 files. I’ve also purchased at least a hundred items off iTunes. I started thinking about my ‘single point of failure’. If that NAS where my music was died, or that USB drive where my backups were died, I’d could potentially be in a world of hurt. With almost 10 years of digital photos, I didn’t want to try to explain to my wife that they were just ‘gone’.

So my original thought was Network Attached Storage (NAS). I bought a relatively cheap NAS and copied all of our music to it. This solution made me feel good for a while, although it was still a single point of failure. Recently the NAS started sounding, well, old. All of my tech friends pointed me at Windows Home Server.

So I purchased the HP EX485 MediaSmart server from Amazon. It only came with 750GB of storage, I knew I’d need to expand it, more on that later.

The Hardware (Click any of the screen shots for larger versions)
The device is like a little computer, ok, it’s not like a little computer, it IS a little computer. Running Windows Home Server OS, touting 2GB of RAM, 2.0GHZ Intel Celeron 64 Bit processor, 4 USB ports, and an eSATA port, there are room for four Serial ATA I or II drives, like I said it came with one 750GB drive.

Almost nothing to ‘hook up’. Just plug in a network cable, and power, and off you go. You start by installing the connector software on a windows based (XP, Vista, or higher) PC. I ran into trouble right off the bat. My primary system is Vista 64 bit, the Windows Home Server did not appreciate this, and insisted it could not find my Windows Home Server (WHS) on the local network.

Networking and Client Connections
After some googling, I found out that 64 bit machines were not supported until a software upgrade called power pack 2 was applied. So I grabbed my little Vista 32 bit netbook, and installed the connector software there. It located my WHS, and asked me some basic setup type questions, what do you want to call the server? do you want the server software to be updated by windows update? do you want to send errors to Microsoft automatically?

I had told the server to update itself, cool I thought. So a massive progress bar was rendered at the bottom of my screen, and it started downloading updates, patches, and what not. It seemed to hang at about 14% for a very long time. I waited two times longer than I promised myself before closing the connector, and reconnecting. I was again presented with the same series of questions.

The server started updating itself again, and as happened last time, it hung at 14% again. Now I’m worried. Here I am with this new thing, and I’ve experienced TWO PROBLEMS already. Not the best user experience. So I called one of my friends that have a server like this, he had never heard of this, but told me a few tricks.

From the command line I ran:

C:>mstsc /console

This opened up the remote desktop client in console mode. He made it abundantly clear to me that you never want to remote desktop into this machine unless you are specified as connecting as the console. He also pointed out you never want to install software like you would a normal PC, or browse the web from it either.

After remoting into the server, entering the username and password, you’re prompted with a screen saying something like how you never want to do this, you can just close it. There’s an icon on the desktop for the HP WHS Console, double click it, and you’re into the primary user interface you’ll use on the local WHS, and on the remote machines that connect to it.

I was able to choose the settings option, and windows update, check for new updates. I was able to now watch updates be applied, and interact with them if needed. A couple passes doing this and a few reboots, and everything was grand.

I told WHS from my netbook to back up my netbook computer. It instantly started, no muss no fuss. I then googled how to connect my 64 bit workstation to it. All you have to do is connect to the WHS Share called software and choose the  “Home Server Connector Software” folder, since Power Pack 2 was applied during Windows Update, it now allowed for 64 bit support.

I then told WHS to backup my primary laptop. I went to my wife’s laptop, connected to the share, and told WHS to backup her laptop. In the course of about 2 hours, I had setup, updated, configured, and backed up all of our computers to the WHS.

I then started the arduous task of copying all of the data from the NAS to WHS. That took a long time. Even now, I’m still in the process of getting iTunes mapped to the new home. WHS has the ability to turn on an iTunes server, allowing you to share out all of your music to multiple sources.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking now, WHS is my single point of failure now? Remember when I said I’d talk about adding storage later? Today I ran down to Fry’s and picked up two 1 TB Hitachi 7200 RPM SATA drives.

Adding More Drive Space and Redundancy

Would you believe adding more drive space to this guy took less time than making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Open the door to the server, select an open tray, pull the tray out, fold down the back flap, drop the drive in, snap it in place, slide the tray with new SATA drive in place, and answer like 4 questions once you click the ‘Add’ option in the console software.

Seriously, that’s IT. One of the cool things I found that appears to be a new feature to Power Pack 2 is the ability to define how a new drive behaves. You have the choice of either adding the drive to the server’s storage pool, (so adding a 1TB drive to a 1TB server will net you ~2TB of space, but you realize it’s not REALLY that much space, a tad less) or backing up the WHS to the newly added drive.

Software Steps for Adding New Storage (Click to enlarge)

So think about that for just a second. Say you have tons of space, but you want to add a new drive dedicated to just backing up what’s on the other drives, that is really cool, as it’s unlikely that any two given drives would fail at once.

I added 2 TB to my server and chose to make it all for shared storage. Once all of my shares were setup, and data was added, I opted to 'duplicate’ my important shares (music, quicken, and user personal shares). What this does is make copies of the data on separate disks, so that single point of failure now has less of a chance of burning me. My data is replicated across multiple disks. I don’t even have to think about it. If I copy new files up, they are replicated automatically.

It’s still technically a single point of failure. My son could dump his juice into the thing, and who knows what would happen. So I’m going to be backing up the WHS sever to the old NAS, and investigating other means of WHS backup. Mozy would be cool, but they treat it like a business since they call WHS a server, and apparently the pricing sucks.

Conclusion
WHS is GREAT for people that want a reliable backup solution, and/or way to share media/files between people on your network. I love the just plug it in and forget about it operation. It’s been running for about three days now, and I’ve almost forgotten about it. Of course I’m obsessively connecting to it making sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to, and it has. The fact that I can just slap in any SATA drive into it amazes me, it does all the work, I’m not worried about RAID configs, or Arrays, or striping or any of that crap, it just handles it. Wow.

The ‘feel good feeling’ I get from it is priceless. And when I explained to my wife it could help us from losing important things (pictures for her) it was an easy sell.

New Posts Coming 
As I learn more about WHS, and streaming media, etc. I’ll be posting more about it in the future.

My little guy is almost three, that just seems crazy to me. Well we’ve been exposing him to a lot of books lately, and I don’t know if “The Giving Tree” was read to him or not, but he caught a glance of the back cover.

He now refers to this as “The Scary Man”.

It’s Shel Siverstein for crying out loud. The dude that brought us such childhood masterpieces as, “Where the Sidewalk Ends”, “The Giving Tree”, and many others.

While I agree, this picture does in fact scare me, I tried to explain that he was probably a nice man. I mean he looks like Cauldwell right? He’s gotta be OK. :)

After Mix 09, and getting excited about Expression Blend 3 and it’s SketchFlow tools, I ran into Balsamiq Mockup, a pretty light weight limited feature mockup application.

The rage this year will be expressing software functionality and prototyping through sketching/mocking up FAST prototypes. Balsamiq Mockups is a decent lightweight tool that if you don’t have Visio, or another drawing program, might be worth looking at.

First the good:
Quick install, runs fast, easy to use. Balsamiq had every type of control that I would want to drop into a mockup, even iPhone related ones. The ability to customize the controls is very slick too, notice in the tabbed menu below, I’ve selected the first tab, and I’ve even added bogus data to the listbox inside that tab. Cool.

But that’s just about where it ends.

The bad:
There’s nothing past dropping elements into the mockup and styling them. There’s no way to add functionality that depicts button clicks, transition states, workflow states, etc. To take a mockup and share it with a client, or coworker, you have to export it as a graphic. There’s no good way to collaborate on a design.

You can export the whole mockup as xml, and email it to someone, or save it as XML and allow them to import it, but that just seems ugly.

Where Expression Blend 3 Kills
With Sketchflow in Expression Blend 3, you’ll be able to create transitions, workflows, even add validation to buttons and form fields. The data tools we saw during Mix 09 are amazing, they’ll allow you to create data from scratch based on the type, you can tell Expression fill this listbox with a list of first and last names, 50 of them please, and it will. I’d be typing forever in Balsamiq, not to mention that once the listbox filled up, I wouldn’t see all the other names whereas in Expression Blend, I could really make the box scroll.

Expression Blend 3 allows me to collaborate and markup prototypes like you can in Microsoft Word. Too cool.

The best part? At the end you have a Silverlight project that you can use as a basis for starting your development project, now that’s useful.

I don’t see the value of Balsamiq for what I want to do at this point. I think it’s a really good first stab, but it’s too feature lacking for me to be interested in using it.

At this point, I’ll continue to sketch something out on a napkin by hand, and wait for Expression Blend 3. Check out this great video from Mix 09 that details the cool new features coming in Expression Blend 3.

(Click the screen shot for a larger image)

Have a folder of images, and you want to rename them all? Maybe it’s like 10 items, and you don’t want to open a renaming utility, or have to go through a bunch of hoops to do a simple task. Simply open the folder, select the first file with the left mouse button (don’t open it), and the press F2 to rename the file. This will highlight just the NAME of the file, type the new name (say “1”), and press TAB (pressing tab is the important part here). You’ll notice that you’ve now automatically jumped to the next file, in rename mode, with just the file name ready to change (not the extension). Now just press “2”, TAB “3” TAB “4” … and so on.

Well delivery is tomorrow. In addition to what you see in the photo below, there will be 2 huge boxes of food, and $400 in Safeway gift cards for groceries.

We talked to the family last week, and it sounds like things are tough for them, they had run out of heating oil, and we were in the middle of a huge cold snap. The good news is that a local oil company stepped up and FILLED their tank for free. I really hope the grocery gift cards help out.

I know I’ve written this in almost EVERY post, but again, I want to thank EVERYONE that donated, whether it was $5, or $500 your assistance is going to make this family feel loved, and give them that true Christmas feeling.

We’ll post one last bit on the blog about this, how the delivery goes. Tomorrow we’re supposed to see up to 6” of snow around here, so we may have quite the challenge in our delivery, that’s ok, we’ll make it an adventure.

Thank you again all, and have a wonderful holiday.

John, Dawn, Katherine and Jake