Restoring data via WHS following drive failure, or trouble in "antiquated" paradise
We made comments in our configuration section that related our use of "antiquated" hardware. Realizing that WHS doesn't really have a form of automatic redundancy with its balancing storage system, we wanted to force the issue. Lo and behold, one of the drives on our 1.2GHz Athlon test bed obliged us and failed on its own.
Once this occurred, we became a tad confused with Windows Home Server. In the Connector, it showed all drives as being fine; however, the backup service had stalled. As Kurt is a professional Windows system administrator by trade, he knew where to look to see what the issue was, but we wanted to use the product as it was intended. He caved and took a peek at the Event Viewer. Apparently, the drive was suffering from continuous bad-sector errors. This in turn caused backups to fail. We were shocked that Windows Home Server didn't at least scrub the Event Viewer for potential drive-related issues.
This brings us to our next gripe: drive removal. Now that Kurt knew there was a failed drive, he decided to remove it using the WHS console. After thinking for a while, Windows Home Server returned a prompt stating that we would lose the backups and some files stored on the 1.2GHz Athlon test bed. Oddly enough, it didn't tell us which files were in jeopardy of being lost, and we think a listing would be nice at this point. At least then you could prepare or attempt to manually copy the files off.
Mac/Linux support
At this point in time, the only way Mac and Linux works with Windows Home Server is by using Samba to access folder shares. There's no word on whether or not the Connector will be ported to these OSes, but we wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. It has, however, been intimated by the developers that the upcoming Time Machine feature on Mac OS X Leopard will be able to use Windows Home Server as a back-end store. Will this simply save Time Machine backups to shared folders using Samba or is there more behind the scenes? We won't know for sure until Leopard comes out later this year.