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I’ve used the Windows Home Server RC1 release for the past few weeks, and it’s pretty good, coming from Microsoft. But as with all too many Microsoft products these days, I think it’s a great idea that has been brought out of the oven half-baked.

The whole storage and automatic backups system is a fantastic idea. But I’m currently moving my data around in preperation to put Linux back on, because of a few nagging issues that Microsoft really should be fixing before launch.

• Backups. Great in theory, but they never work. I got my laptop backing up ok, but because I only ever use my laptop once in a blue moon, WHS was always complaining the backups were too old (despite the fact the data hadn’t changed). Not really a problem. My desktop, on the other hand, I could not get to back up successfully. I think it managed once, but almost every time, whether manual or automatic, it claimed the computer was restarted mid-backup. The desktop was running Vista Ultimate, the laptop running XP Professional.
• Storage Balancing. I like the concept behind WHS’ storage system, how you can specify some folders for duplication and not others, and how it’s all pooled into one big store. One of the nagging issues for me was that WHS never seems to be happy, and is always balancing the storage. Trying to get it precise.
• Storage Share Issues. On the same storage note, there are a few big bugs with the storage system. Some just a pain, some require some workarounds. For example, when you try to find the size of a group of files via the network share, Windows XP will report the size on disk as anywhere between a few kilobytes and a few hundred megabytes while reporting the real size nearby, Vista just reports the wrong values every time. The other issue is that programs which constantly access a file on the disk, such as BitTorrent, must write their temporary files to a local disk, NOT the shared storage, then move the complete files to storage when finished. Even then uTorrent had random bouts of not being able to find files and the like.
• Not-so-Universal Plug and Play. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, don’t allow you to manually forward ports. WHS simply must do the port forwarding itself, and via UPnP no less. Only problem being, you have to use a UPnP router, and even then, many UPnP routers don’t work very well with WHS. Port forwarding just died a lot of times with the routers I tried, then the WHS console would just start screaming at me. I’m back to hard forwarded ports for Remote Desktop and static IP addresses now, thankyou very much.

Even if they did fix these issues before launch, I probably won’t go back to WHS. It’s nice, but it’s typical Microsoft thinking. Make it easy to use, but don’t allow any room for people who know what they’re doing to make adjustments. Addins are a nice touch, but there’s only so much addins can do. And software RAID-5 under Linux was just so fast, it’s painful to put up with the single drive transfer speeds you’re stuck with under WHS. Unless you go hardware RAID, but that’s another story.