Windows Home Server 2011 as a Desktop OS?
2013-12
Andronicus
I have an old Laptop that requires a Windows OS licence. It appears that Windows Home Server 2011 is about half the price of a Windows 7 licence, so my question is if it is suitable to be used in place of Windows 7?
My hardware specs are reasonable, Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz, 4Gb ram. I know a lot of people use Windows Server 2008 as a desktop OS, so are there any restrictions in Home server that would prevent this kind of use?
afrazier
My gut wants to say "No, this is a bad idea -- there's probably too many things that are missing or won't work, software that will fail to install on a 'Server' OS, and features and design that are different enough to be a constant headache for your users." However, I don't have any real proof of it, but at the same time I can't find any references to anyone running WHS 2011 as a desktop OS either. This is as opposed to running Server 2008 R2 as a desktop OS, which plenty of people do for various reasons (some good, some... not so good).
While it may or may not work for personal use I'm not sure I'd want to deploy something like that to other users, particularly if they're not tech-savvy.
john
Not sure about WHS 2011, but I installed Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Notepad++, PSPad, SQL 2005 express, SQL Manager Express, MYSQL, and Windows SharePoint on my Acer H340 WHS 2003 without any issues! I used it when I'm outside my home via logmein.
wellborn
As with any windows os there is the one and only problem is driver support. If you manage to find the right "Windows Home Server" drivers for your laptop you can try to install. If that fails I suggest you give Ubuntu a try.
Simon
What ways are there to copy a windows home server backup to an offsite location?
I'm talking specifically (and only) about the automated backup of my entire machine, and not the shared network folders.
I am 90% working away from home on my laptop which has a 640GB drive so the shared folders are essentially useless to me. I backup every night, but if my house burns down or broken into the I'm in serious serious trouble !
I'm really looking for some alternative way to back up my entire machine - which much not interfere with the reliability or speed by which my WHS backs up my laptop every night. Either a way to 'export' a complete machine backup from the server, or recommendations on non-conflicting software I can backup to a 1TB drive at work are what I'm looking for.
Note: I believe that WHS uses its own completely proprietary backup and doesn't use things like any 'backup bit' or 'archive bit'. I just dont want to install some other backup software that will conflict.
PS I'm now running Windows 7 and just realized that I should probably check out the backup functionality it gives me. I assume that won't conflict right!
Edit: Thanks for the hosted solutions. I'd also appreciate ways to backup to an 'offsite' location that I control - like my office vs. my home. The hosted solutions I think will be too slow or expensive for my needs.
user4197
Another alternative would be KeepVault. They seem to have better pricing.
IDisposable
You should probably look into several things.
First, regarding the use of shared folders, you can use Windows Live Sync to make any folder on your laptop (or elsewhere) get mirrored to the WHS's User folder of your choice. This will lead to bogus "File Conflict" messages because WHS can't replicate the open file .fslock that Live Sync creates (I've filed a bug report on this on the WHS Connect site). That said, though, the idea is that Live Sync will keep folders of your choosing mirrored no matter where you are. This will NOT give you historical backups, just current-version.
Second, regarding a backup of the WHS itself. I recommend using the BDBB add-in to force WHS to duplicate backup-database files to multiple drives. This will make you resilient to a crash of the primary drive on the WHS server (the C: SYSTEM and D: DATA partitions). I've survived a crash of those twice while retaining my complete backup history.
Third, if you want an offsite regular backup of the WHS server, you can use an external USB drive of sufficient size. When you plug it into the WHS server, you can opt to use it for system backups. It'll copy everything to the external drive and then tell you to dismount it. Now take that drive offsite. This is not a continuous backup, but it is better than nothing.
Forth, you can use one of the excellent tools listed in other posts... Mozy, JungleDisk (my favorite), KeepVault and let things backup to the internet. This can be kind of expensive, and is very slow to recover from, but your data is very safe.
Lastly, you can do my favorite thing. Using CrashPlan you can backup to some one else's machine over the internet. CrashPlan is awesome because you basically make an agreement with one or more people (like my father, brother and I) who all make backup space available to the CrashPlan program. It compresses, encrypts and stores my backups on all shared machines in our person "network", and each other machine on the network will store stuff on my machines. The way I use it is to have a big drive that I bought for my dad and my brother, installed it on their machines and setup CrashPlan. Now we can all survive a complete nuke-strike.
user4197
JungleDisk for WHS will put your data in the Amazon S3 cloud with no subscription fee. You pay $0.15/GB/month for the storage. It's currently in beta.
Matt Simmons
Since it's windows, it's conveniently partitioned off for you by drive letters.
Have you looked into ntbackup, the built-in backup solution? It would be trivial if you could mount the remote location as a drive. At the sizes you're talking about, I sure do hope the "remote" machine is on the same network, because that will take a while.
JakeRobinson
Mozy!!!!
Block-level incremental backup: After the initial backup, Mozy only backs up files that have been added or changed, making subsequent backups lightning fast.
Edit: Asus Web Storage as a WHS add-in.