Windows Home Server RTM

According to Qblogger over at the official Windows Home Server Blog, the code has been finalized and released to manufacturing. I tested the software on and off throughout the beta and it’s an overall well designed product. I’ve seen a few people complaining about it lacking certain features, but they seem to forget what the purpose of this device is. This is a media sharing and desktop system backup solution. It’s a server for suburbian families that have lots of music and photos they want the kids to be able to get to easily. It’s a desktop backup system that is simple to use so any important information on any system in the home is protected from hardware/software failure.

This product is not a corporate or professional level server. It isn’t meant to run Exchange or SQL or host your blog. If you want these things, go buy Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server or build a Linux box. However, if what you’re looking for is a system to backup the important files on your home computers and share your media from a central, always-on location … then this is a good choice. It integrates almost seamlessly with XP and Vista (at least from my experience) and does a good job at the tasks it was designed for. As a matter of fact, the only problem I had was that I didn’t setup my main Vista system to backup before I toasted it with an errant RAID driver upgrade. (My main system has about 200GB more storage than the box I used for the Home Server.) Oh well, live and learn.

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