Hot on the heals of various announcements this month, Tranquil PC have started to give some hints on a new project they are working on called SAFE Home Server.
There isn’t much information at the moment, but knowing Tranquil it will be something interesting, useful and worth the wait!
Here’s the little information they have released so far…..
For sure, your Home Server ‘data’ – the important stuff, is safe as long as you have more than one Hard Disk Drive (HDD) fitted to your Home Server, and folder duplication is enabled. Tranquil will always recommend at least two HDDs are always used on Home Servers, unless you use off site backup services too.
Also the primary HDD containing the Operating System (OS) partition is safe, due to the simple way that a Home Server can be ‘Restored’ over the network (another great solution from the Microsoft Home Server team) even if the HDD fails (physically).
However, due to the nature of the Restore process, certain things are lost – ALL the DATA can be recovered safely from any Duplicated Folders, but any specific user settings / folder access permissions etc and installed Add Ins / application software installed on the Home Server is lost. This is not often a problem to the home user, but in a small business environment (where down time / rebuilding would cause an problem) it may be critical.
Tranquil R&D team have agonised over how to create / supply a hardened Home Server product – ie one that is as ‘SAFE’ as possible, safe from ALL HDD failure, even protecting the Primary HDD. This short series will explain the issues, the opportunities, and the final solution – the “Safe Home Server”.
Watch this series as we build the world’s first OEM ‘Safe Home Server’
So, if you want to follow this series, and learn more about a SAFE Home Server, click here.
Someone needs to create an Add-In that exports the user data and settings!
one that is as
thanks as always John 🙂
Andrew
The Safe Server, is indeed 'just that' – safe.
It's a hardware feature (Safe Server Module), an Add In would involve complex / expensive / unreliable components no doubt.
http://www.green-pcs.co.uk will display details as Safe Server is made ready for release.
Would you like to know via email, for example, that the OS (primary) HDD has potential issues or has even failed (how does that happen, if the drive has failed ?) – and how to resolve the problem ?
Or how about checking the health state of the Safe Server module in the Safe Server, on your LAN ?
Safe Server is all about looking after the (vulnerable) primary HDD (OS) – the data disks are suitably taken care of by the great data WHS duplication function.
I hope the thread here is interesting to UsingWHS users.
I have not read on any windows home server site "use a surge protector" and one on your modem/router why?
and why are there not more addons to copy or backup the entire home server to another home server or storage device?
Tyler
These questions are better asked in our forums rather than here.
But to try and answer them – if you want to put a surger protector on, that is your choice.
As for the add-ins question, my guess is that because WHS can backup its shared folders itself to an external drive and you can quite easily back up the database to external drive as well why would people spend time creating an add-in to do the same thing? Thats just a guess of course…
Andrew