Windows Home Server In The Office?
This week a nice big box was waiting for me at home. It was a nice new HP ML115 server but unfortunately its not for me to keep, its for my Dad. For those of you that don’t know I handle the IT for my parents business. Its quite a handy role. I can pretty much do everything remotely, it helps towards refilling my pockets and its getting me quite alot of experience in all sort of areas in IT which I can then use on my placement or when I need to look for a job in 2 years time.
Anyway back to the point. Why the nice shiny server I hear you ask? Well its part of a plan I am putting in place in order to keep everything on the business computers backed up! There is a simple backup system in place but it doesn’t cover everything. Only the important bits. So its Windows Home Server to the rescue. Yep that’s right I’m going to put Windows Home Server on the new machine. Windows Home Server (WHS) is quite handy when it comes to small business’s and/or offices. In this case the backup of networked computers is the main reason WHS is being deployed and here is why…
- Backs up all the computers daily
- Pretty much restore a computer in 10 minutes.
- Restore a whole computer or that file you just deleted
- Doesn’t use up terabytes of data space
Its an all round win. You can aswell, with a bit of a nudge join it to a domain and run services on it like Virtual Machines, DNS, FTP etc etc..
I’m not the only one deploying WHS in a small business. Microsoft even recommends it and are starting to push the idea to small business’s…
First of the Month
Which means it is 27 days till I move to Birmingham. I getting quite excited about the prospect as I get a taste tomorrow with a trip to the data-centre with the current placement student.
May has been an interesting month, I have turned 20, which I still find a little fascinating. It seems a long time yet the last 4/5 years have gone so fast.. Does time speed up as you get older? I’ve moved back home after two years (I don’t think two weeks last summer counted) and well I can’t think of anything to add to the list but anyway…
In my last post I forgot to mention I got a little camera for my birthday.. I’m not a mad snapper but I thought it be nice to have one.. so when I grab some nice photos a new section will come to life on the blog, its hiding away as its got nothing to show for now.
I finally got round to installing Windows 7 on my laptop which I am currently using to write this post. I’m liking the new features and tweaks that keep surprising me, the latest is the sub menus on the start menu. Pined items when hovered over produce a sub menu with options for you, for example its shows the recent history of the devices you have connected to with Remote Desktop which skips a step when accessing the machines as shown below…
Which reminds me! I’ve been quite impressed with Windows Home Server lately which is installed on Stewie. After reading up on the way Home Server backups machines and the restore process when I first purchased the operating system. I was quite confident that if and when my computer fell over it would be ok as I could just restore it from a backup, I never tested this out though.. I suppose it was at a time that it it isn’t broke, don’t fix it as I was in the middle of uni and formatting a pc for the fun of it wasn’t my top 10 things to do.
However the time did come for me to use it. The process was so simple. The restore CD is a Live CD, which for those of you that don’t know, is a bootable operating system that doesn’t require or use a hard-drive . It didn’t require any drivers importing at all and after a few clicks the machine was restoring its self.. Magic!!
So magic I have to say… Matt, a house mate, an avid Mac fan.. has got him self one. A Tranquil SQA-5H I believe… and I do believe soon the Home Server will be able to take backup images of Apple Mac’s using the Time Machine application.. not sure though…
On this point I have to finish and make my way back to Stafford..
