Using Windows Home Server for data redundancy

J

jdraughn

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 9, 2007
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I am confused/unsure about redundancy in WHS. I have read quite a few threads about, and still not sure. From what I understand you choose the data you want backups of, and it stores it on the other drives, but if this is the case, then all your data that you want backed up will take twice as much hard drive space compared to normal.

I have a media center with gigabytes worth of tv shows, movies and music, and I am constantly looking to add more data. It's a pain because I have different sized hard drives and not enough sata ports, let alone a raid 5 controller card so that if one drive goes out, I don't lose anything/everything. I was using the built in raid controller on one of my motherboards, and the motherboard went out, so i replaced it with a different motherboard (nvidia chipset again), and it saw my raid array and I didn't lose everything. But now my new motherboard has ALSO gone out. It's getting pretty irritating. Sounds like WHS is the ticket, but

Anyway, there is no kind of parity in the WHS drive manager? So if I want to have backups of EVERYTHING on the server, it WILL require double the hard drives?

Come to think of it, it may actually be cheaper to buy twice the hard drives and use any old sata controller card/external usb drives then have half the drives and a 800.00 raid card (I think I was looking at a 16 drive areca raid card).
 
Depends on if you setup the individual folders up with duplication.
As a rule of thumb I'd say go ahead and buy double the storage.
 
RAID is not backup, a second copy of the data is. It does provide a very slight additional layer of protection, but its more for protecting uptime than protecting your data. If that is your sole means of protection, you can very likely find yourself very, very screwed.

But with multiple mismatched drives, WHS is ideal. You also will not need an expensive RAID controller, just basic SATA or PATA controllers. It has many options for protecting your data with whatever hardware you make available to it.

And if you don't want to buy the extra storage for proper backup, have you considered DVD-R for at least the absolute essentials?
 
alan2308 said:
RAID is not backup, a second copy of the data is. It does provide a very slight additional layer of protection, but its more for protecting uptime than protecting your data. If that is your sole means of protection, you can very likely find yourself very, very screwed.

But with multiple mismatched drives, WHS is ideal. You also will not need an expensive RAID controller, just basic SATA or PATA controllers. It has many options for protecting your data with whatever hardware you make available to it.

And if you don't want to buy the extra storage for proper backup, have you considered DVD-R for at least the absolute essentials?
Click to expand...

I'm lost with your post.

He never said that RAID was a backup.
He wanted to protect his data against a drive failure
He stated that he wants to buy double he storage capacity already



OP: What about just keeping seperate drives on your regular operating system, buy a few 1TB drives, manually backup (or use a sync program) each drive occasionally.
 
You can turn duplication on or off per folder in WHS, In my set up i have duplication turned off and run a 3rd party program (cobian) to do backups every other day to an external drive.
 
Thruthfully I don't want "back ups" per se, I just don't want to lose anything if I lose a hard drive / hard drives. Raid 6 is actually ideal, I could lose up to two hard drives simutaneously, and still not lose anything. What happens in WHS if I were to remove 1 hard drive (to simulate a drive failure), or how about two drives? Will I permanently lose any data?

I don't really care about backups on my main computers. I will most likely have 3, possibly 4 systems total in my house.
1. Laptop (main rig). I could hopefully just wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows at anytime and not lose anything important, since it should be on Windows Home Server.

2. HTPC (in a slim HTPC case, with just the bare essentials). Would be cool if they made external DVD burners that worked either wirelessly, or plugged into Cat5. That way I could put it on the side taple next to my couch, and not even have to SEE the HTPC, since thats the only reason you would need easy access to it, is to put in a DVD to watch a movie. I remodeled my living room and put a cat5 jack in the middle of each of my living-room walls. So a Cat5 connected DVD drive would be ideal.

3. Windows Home Server - Where I put all the media that my HTPC will use. My HTPC will also save my recorded TV shows to a network share. I would also map a drive thats on the storage server for "storage" space for my notebook. I will install all my programs to my c:\ on my notebook, but as far as holding on to important documents, like turbo tax files, those will all be on my file server where I would hopefully never have to worry about losing them do to hardware failure.

I like the fact I can access all my music from anywhere I have a network connection. If I am sitting in Barns & Nobles or im at my parents house, I can just browse to my Windows Home Server and download anything just as if I was in my own house (albeit slower of course).

If some decent games would come out, I could see myself creating a 4th rig just for gaming, but the 8800M GTS in the notebook im getting will be ok for now.

Thats what I am wondering about data redundancy capabilities of WHS. If drives fail, will I lose any data?
 
jdraughn said:
Anyway, there is no kind of parity in the WHS drive manager? So if I want to have backups of EVERYTHING on the server, it WILL require double the hard drives?
Click to expand...

Yes, strange how that works - you need twice the storage to make a copy of everything. ;)

So, with WHS you'll migrate your data to the WHS box and turn on folder duplication for all the stuff you want to have 2 copies of and that will balance the data across multiple drives. Then the media machine will be much cleaner and act more as a client.

Where WHS does save on space is with the client backups. As I understand it, the scheduled backups of [up to 10, per the WHS license] client PC's is done by looking at the data first. The first PC it backs up will be a full backup, then the next it will only backup non-duplicate files - so if you have application X installed on multiple PC's then it will skip the files on the second and consecutive PC's. Then on later backups it will only backup new files or files that have changed.

I was in the same exact software RAID5 conundrum last fall before I took the plunge with WHS. I've ditched the RAID setup since WHS doesn't always like it and have the one OS drive plus 9 other drives of various sizes and brands in the box that run off of basic controller cards. I've turned on duplication for our photos and personal data, then I back up those to an external drive.
 
WHS with duplication can handle 1 drive failure no problem. It will then start to rebalance the files that need to be duplicated that were on the failed drive. This will likely take hours, maybe up to 10 depending on the drives size, and this also assumes you have enough space then. If a drive that holds the only copy of a file fails during this time you'd lose it, but the chances are probably pretty slim of that happening. Essentially, any surplus drives space is your 'hot spare' but it needs time to copy the data over.

Also note that mapping drives isn't done in WHS. I think that if you prowl the WHS forums enough you'll find that drive mapping can be done, but this also goes against the whole DE (drive extender) architecture and don't think it can duplicate folders then. The shares vs. mapping haven't been an issue for me. It seems more like 6 of one, half dozen of another thing.

You can add or delete shares from the stock Video, Music, Photos, etc. shares that it comes set up with. I posted some sceenshots of my setup in this thread: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1262238&


p.s. If you look at my sig you'll see that we have similar setups, but my wife uses the Dell laptop and I have my desktop for gaming.
 
[LYL]Homer;1032516707 said:
WHS with duplication can handle 1 drive failure no problem. It will then start to rebalance the files that need to be duplicated that were on the failed drive. This will likely take hours, maybe up to 10 depending on the drives size, and this also assumes you have enough space then. If a drive that holds the only copy of a file fails during this time you'd lose it, but the chances are probably pretty slim of that happening. Essentially, any surplus drives space is your 'hot spare' but it needs time to copy the data over.
Click to expand...

I guess what it comes down to is to install it and play around with it. Sounds like it's a whole different animal then what im used too.
 
jdraughn said:
I guess what it comes down to is to install it and play around with it. Sounds like it's a whole different animal then what im used too.
Click to expand...

WHS is different by design, it's designed to basically be "brain dead" and not require significant input from the user. So many of the administrative tasks and concepts that one normally associates with a server don't apply.

That being said the poster about who mentioned having an external drive that kept a second copy of important files off the home server had a good point. I do the same thing with my WHS setup and honestly would with any server setup as I would not want to lose family pictures.
 
What WHS does is for folder duplication is that if you were to have it enabled for all your data folders and a drive failed you would not lose your data. However it is very slow. But is really a good solution for people who have drives of different speeds, and sizes. But if you have same size speed drive you will get much better performance and same protection from a raid1.
 
So, let me get some things straights.
1. As far as I am concerned, the drive WHS creates is just one big virtual drive, and I don't need to worry about what partitions what data is going onto?

2. I could make a share called media, and in that share have \tv shows, \movies, \music, and set some kind of flag to duplicate my "media" share, so if any of the drives goes out, I don't lose anything?

I want EVERYTHING to be duplicated, not just "important" files. Everything IS important to me. Backing up to DVD is not a viable answer when you have over a terabyte worth of ripped dvd's and cd's. hell, might as well just rerip everything again if i would have to restore one by one off disk (which is what I have had to do, and why i was looking at an expensive raid controller card).
 
jdraughn said:
So, let me get some things straights.
1. As far as I am concerned, the drive WHS creates is just one big virtual drive, and I don't need to worry about what partitions what data is going onto?

2. I could make a share called media, and in that share have \tv shows, \movies, \music, and set some kind of flag to duplicate my "media" share, so if any of the drives goes out, I don't lose anything?

I want EVERYTHING to be duplicated, not just "important" files. Everything IS important to me. Backing up to DVD is not a viable answer when you have over a terabyte worth of ripped dvd's and cd's. hell, might as well just rerip everything again if i would have to restore one by one off disk (which is what I have had to do, and why i was looking at an expensive raid controller card).
Click to expand...

Yes, I have 6 drives in my WHS (5 added to the server pool and one not added that my backups are written to) when you install WHS it creates a 20GB system partition for the Os and then all of the rest of the space is treated as one giant drive. when you add new drives they are added to the "one giant drive" There is no drive letters for adding additional drives

By default it creates 6 "shared folders" Users (with a private folder for each PC connected to the WHS) Music, Photos, Software, Videos and Public. when you install the connector software it automgically sets up the share access and puts a shortcut on the desktop to the shared folders. All PCs on the network can access every share but the user specific folder in the User share (unless you set it up with access to other peoples folder)
 
1. Yes, here's the "big drive" on my system before I added two more 750gb drives:
my.php


and here are the shares:
my.php


This interface is available to check things out on the server from any client pc on your network, as well as the server itself.

2. You can see that I've made additional shares like \Military, \Ebooks, \Audiobooks. This is also where you turn on duplication if you want it on.
 
"Military" sounds important, and yet you don't have duplication on? :)

Also, another thought: I use Jungledisk for internet off-site backups. It's a free app that uses Amazon's S3 service. It's costing me around $10/month to host around 60GB IIRC, but the peace of mind that knowing my PC could go up in smoke and I would have off-site backups of all my family memories etc is worth a hefty price IMHO.
 
DDuckMan said:
Before you plan your system, make sure you know about the data corruption bug in WHS. Any multi-drive WHS box is exposed to the risk of data loss, so I am currently running a single RAID 1 array. When the bug is fixed (supposedly July) it should be safe to add drives to the pool.

http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2979617&SiteID=50
Click to expand...
The issue only pops up when directly modify the metadata on files stored on the WHS.

That doesn't preclude editing files on the clients then moving them to the WHS. It's a pain, but it's an easy workaround.

Also, there is a public beta of Powerpack 1 for WHS that fixes the corruption bug that will be available soon.
 
Thanks for posting that jebo. thats the work around I use too. WHS is great. It will get better too.
 
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