Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I have outsourced all my local backups to Windows Home Server and now am the proud owners of http://shahine.homeserver.com. What these guys have built is slick.
I've been using the product since it was in private beta and more than anything else love the fact that it's completely independent. It just does what it does best every night and I never have to even think about it doing its job. It's completely headless and configurationless.
My HomeServer is currently running on a PC with two 500GB hard drives (one internal and one external). It does the following for me:
In the last 2 months HomeServer has saved my tush two times.
Once when my wife managed to lose a file that she was working on and Restore Previous Versions in Vista didn't have a recent enough copy. I was able to grab it from the nightly backup from WHS.
Another time I wanted to replace a failed C drive in my Media Center. The drive though had two partitions, C and D. The C Partition was too small for Vista (15 GB) and when replacing the drive I wanted to double the size of the C Partition. The built-in Vista Complete PC Backup tool is unable to create and restore an image to the boot partition that is a different size. I was stuck.
Well lo and behold I burned a boot DVD for Windows HomeServer, popped the new drive into my Media Center and booted from CD. I was then able to restore both my C and D partition to my new primary drive from the backup on HomeServer over the network. The whole experience was amazing. The HomeServer automatically recognized my PC by MAC address and suggested exactly what I wanted to do. It even gave me the option of keeping the new partition size of 30GB for the C drive. Total down time... 30 min including opening the case and replacing the drive.
In short, Windows HomeServer is an essential computer for anyone with more than one PC and anyone that never wants to think about backups.
I love that I never have to configure anything. It backs up the entire computer quickly and efficiently without wasting any space.
The team hit a home run. I plan to have all my family members purchase a HomeServer so that I never have to worry about them losing data.