Let me describe to you my madness.

I have amassed more than 26,000 photos (230GB) and 120GB of Photoshop files.  My operating system and iTunes library (115GB) reside on separate striped volumes where if a single drive goes, it all goes.  (But they are fast…)

Emily uses a laptop that’s approaching the 4 year mark.  The hard drive so far seems healthy, but we all know about the Murphy-esque nature of modern hard drives.  And, once you factor in my personal negative bearing on hard drive lifetimes, you see we’re rolling the dice with our magnetic bits and bytes.

I’ve tried several different backup strategies.  The most tedious required burning a week’s groceries’ worth of DVDs which, yes, took a really, really long time and had about a 0.05% completion rate.  I’ve tried other, more reasonable solutions but none seem to stick.  Entre “jelly”.

Windows Home Server: Jelly to my Peanut Butter

Windows Home Server is a Windows Server 2003-based product (read: stable) which completely automates home network backup.  It runs nightly backups of every machine on the network (including wireless), and it maintains daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots.  The backups are images, meaning you can restore an entire system with the provided restore CD; it’s also possible to pull out individual files if you need to.

If you can believe it, there’s more.  WHS also provides network shares for pictures, video, music, and documents.  Each of these folders can be marked for duplication–meaning WHS will automatically ensure that those files are on two hard drives at all times.  You can attach printers to the USB ports to have a networked printer.  You can remote desktop through a web interface to any computer in your network.  In the case of my HP ex485, there’s an iTunes server and video transcoding.  There’s Media Center integration.  It will do your homework and feed your kids, and make it so you don’t have to shave in the morning.

Basically, it’s a dream come true for home network reliability and convenience.

HP ex485 MediaSmart Server

I purchased the HP ex485 MediaSmart Server from Newegg.  At the time of purchase (6/09) it cost $499 and came with a Celeron 440 2.0GHz 64-bit processor, 2GB RAM, and one 750GB hard drive which takes up one of the four hot-swap drive bays.  I bought three spare 1TB drives at $70 apiece to flesh out the storage and ended up with about 3.5TB of total space on the server.  Total cost: $700.  (I got cashback through Microsoft Bing).

The HP ex485 runs Windows Home Server but has been extended by HP to include better media integration and sharing features:

• iTunes server **Note that you can’t sync iPods to music streaming from an iTunes server!  While I understand the reasoning, I still feel like yelling “Whose great idea was that?!”
• HP media collector with web interface to browse your media.
• Video transcoding for desktop and mobile devices.
• iPod/iPhone app for browsing pictures, listening to music, and watching video streamed from the server.

Setup and configuration of the user accounts and backup schedule have been breezy-easy.  I’ve played around with pulling files out of the backup images, and that was easy.  Backups transfer at gigabit speeds.  Automatic updates keep everything running smoothly.  The user interface is fairly well done; not as nice as an Apple UI, but functional and easy to navigate.

If you’re still burning DVDs for hours on end or trying to remember to copy files to a slow USB drive regularly, seriously consider a Windows Home Server box.  HP, Acer, and several others make them.  Or just use an old computer and buy a $99 WHS license from Newegg.  Honestly, it’s hard to go wrong.

To complete my own backup strategy, I’ll be hooking up an eSATA drive to the ex485 every so often to pull off my photos and I plan on storing that in a newly constructed, earthquake-hardened building at the U.  Because I live in a 40-year old cinderblock building on top of a major fault which is overdue for its 100-yr behemoth of a shakedown.  If that strikes, well, it’s been nice knowing you and enjoy the photos.

Look for tips and how-to’s to show up in the near future.