I see that Windows Home Server 2011 has been released to manufacturing. So it should be available on the market in April/May.

I’m sorry, but I can only raise a faint cheer about this product. It doesn’t strike me as a major step forward from the original Windows Home Server, and in some respects – notably the removal of the Drive Extender technology – it is a step backwards.

The comparison datasheet is long on marketing and short on actual comparison with WHSv1, and that’s not really surprising.

What really gets to me is that Microsoft had the chance to build upon the base of WHSv1 as a server and media appliance that could be used by the average consumer, and they’ve thrown that chance away.

I’m channelling Victor Meldrew again today. And the cause of my frustration is once again the forthcoming Windows Home Server 2011. I wasn’t too impressed with some of the backup features I found when I looked at them a few days ago. After digging a bit further, I’ve come across one “feature” that has flabbergasted me. It really should be called a bug, because it introduces an extraordinary limitation into WHS 2011.

It turns out that the maximum size of a server backup that can be made is 2TB.

OK, you say, but WHS 2011 recognises multiple backup discs. So suppose my WHS has 5 TB of data that needs to be backed up, then I just use three backup discs, right? Two discs of 2TB capacity and one disc of 1TB capacity (or three discs each of 2TB capacity; the third will only be half-used). Plug ‘em in, let the server backup processes run, and everything’s hunky-dory, right?

Wrong.

Even though WHS 2011 will recognise multiple backup discs, it won’t let you slice up the server storage across them. You can only backup the same files and folders to any of the multiple discs. So, in the example I used above, even though I have three backup discs, I can only ever backup a maximum of 2TB of the 5TB stored on my server.

I ask you, what sort of design is that? The term brain-dead springs to mind.

The WHS team at least do recognise the limitation. Over at the Microsoft Connect bug-reporting site, a member of the team has written:

At this time we can only back up to 1 single 2 TB disk. We realize the limitation and are working with the Core Windows team to fix this. Hopefully it’s something we can provide in future releases. For now you have to pick your critical data.

Er, “hopefully” you can fix it? Dear lord, is that the best that you can do?

It turns out that there seems to be a workaround, but it’s not, I think, for the average home user – you know, the sort of person that WHS 2011 is targeted at.

WHS 2011 is built on top of Windows Server 2008 R2 – an extremely powerful server operating system. This has its own Backup and Restore mechanism, which is equally powerful. However, this mechanism is designed for IT people, not for the home user. Here, for example, is a screenshot of partof the Overview of Windows Server Backup, taken from the online help manual (click to see in its full gory glory). Full of jargon and certainly not for the faint of heart (or non-IT person)…

If you want to take a look at the full manual, then please, be my guest, and visit Microsoft’s online help web site.

Now, it is certainly possible to use the Backup and Restore mechanism of Windows Server 2008 R2 to do what I want to do – slice the 5TB of storage on my WHS across three backup discs, but I’ll have to figure it out for myself, and start being an IT person again.

The whole point is that I shouldn’t have to do this. WHS 2011 is supposed to be for the home user.

The last irony about all of this is that in fact the backup features of WHS 2011 do seem to be using the underlying mechanisms of Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s just that their current design is extraordinarily limited, and, in my case with more than 2TB of data on my server, utterly useless.

Update 20 October 2011: I see that Microsoft have now posted a TechNet article covering this 2TB limit in the TechNet Wiki. Since it’s a wiki, I’ve edited it to improve the language and the grammar. The original was clearly written by someone for whom English is not their first language.

Update 31 March 2014: It appears as though there has been some improvement made to the Server Backup function in the Dashboard since I originally wrote this article. It remains the case that WHS 2011 continues to use the VHD format for backup, which has a maximum capacity of 2TB. However, it now appears (contrary to what Microsoft originally stated) as though the Server Backup function can now deal with multiple VHDs, providing the backup drive is big enough. So, if your backup drive is 4TB, that means you can have 2 VHDs of 2TB created on it. That, in turn, means that you can backup up to 4TB of data from your data storage drives (with a maximum of 2TB for any one drive). That’s a theoretical maximum, since Microsoft also recommend having some free space in the VHDs to handle incremental backups.

I wrote yesterday that I’d decided to kick the tyres of the Release Candidate of Windows Home Server 2011. Today, I thought I’d take a look at how server backups are handled in WHS 2011.

First, a bit of background. WHS Version 1 can make backups of its shared folders (e.g. the Pictures, Videos, Music and User folders held on the server) to external discs. This is a one-click manual process (see figure 1). That means, unlike the backups of client computers attached to the server, there’s no built-in function in WHS V1 to schedule the backups of shared folders. Also, WHS V1 does not have the option of backing up the client computer backups from the server itself onto external discs. There’s a third-party add-in to do this, but this function is not built into WHS V1 by Microsoft.

figure 1

When it comes to WHS 2011, there are a number of changes in this area over WHS V1. First, server backups are always scheduled – you can’t actually initiate a server backup manually with one click of a button (NOTE: the final version of WHS 2011 does now contain a button to start a server backup manually. Microsoft added this in). Second, in WHS 2011, server backups can include both the contents of the shared folders and the backups of the client computers held on the server.

I find these changes a bit of a mixed blessing. First the good news: it’s great that you can backup the client computer backups to external discs in addition to the shared folders (see figure 2).

figure 2

However, I’m less enthusiastic about the fact that server backups are always scheduled, and that they run daily (see figure 3).

figure 3

Let’s think a moment about the nature of these backups to external discs. As far as I’m concerned, they are for the purpose of making backups to be held offsite. That’s what I use them for, at any rate. If I were to have the external discs permanently connected to a WHS 2011 system, then, it seems to me, I’m only getting a slower version of the Shared Folder duplication that was built into WHS V1 and which was provided by the now-removed Drive Extender technology.

And Microsoft’s own guidelines for Backup best practices for WHS 2011 state:

You should backup server data to multiple external hard disks and rotate the hard disks between onsite and offsite storage locations. Doing so can improve your disaster preparedness planning by helping you recover your data if physical damage occurs to the hardware onsite.

So if I’m going to be using the external discs for making server backups to be held offsite, then allowing the backups to be made only on a scheduled basis seems to be a bit counter-intuitive to me. I want to be able to fetch the discs from offsite, plug them in, push a button to initiate the server backups, and then return them offsite. I do this on a weekly basis. I can do this with WHS V1; I can’t do this with WHS 2011: (a ) there’s no manual server backup and (b ) the backups run on a daily schedule. At the time of originally writing this post, the Beta version of WHS 2011 did not have the capability to manually initiate a server backup. The final release version does. However, the backup task still continues to run on a daily basis…

In fact, even the act of removing external discs seems less clear in WHS 2011. In WHS v1, once the server backup is complete, then I simply select the external drive and click “Remove drive”. WHS V1 will ask if I want to remove the drive temporarily or permanently (see figure 4), and I select the “temporary” option. The disc is then safely dismounted from the system, and it can be returned to its offsite location.

figure 4

In WHS 2011, if I select an external drive, I don’t get a choice to remove it temporarily, the only option shown is to remove it permanently from the server backup (see the tasks shown in figure 5). Choosing this starts the “Customise Server Backup” wizard (see figure 6), which I find somewhat confusing. I’m not trying to customise the server backup – I want to remove the drive… It turns out that the only way to temporarily remove a drive seems to be to yank out the cable. I suppose I’m set in my ways, but I always prefer to safely eject media (as WHS V1 allows me to do).

figure 5

figure 6

The elephant in the room with server backups is that WHS 2011 can’t easily deal with discs bigger than 2TB. Now I know that even only a couple of years ago, this would have seemed an enormous capacity. However, with today’s high definition media, coupled with the ready availability of 3TB discs (with higher capacities on the horizon), then this limitation seems very surprising. The sad fact is that the backup method that Microsoft has chosen to go with in WHS 2011 has 2TB built-in as an upper limit. Never mind the fact that Windows 7 (even Windows Vista) and Windows Server 2008 (the operating system underneath WHS 2011) can support disks of more than 2TB capacity, WHS 2011 and its backup does not. If you install discs of more than 2TB into WHS 2011, then you must partition the disc into chunks, none of which can be more than 2TB in size. Even more frustrating, you can’t even backup a client computer that has a disc of more than 2TB assigned as one contiguous space. The Windows 7 client computer will be perfectly happy, but WHS 2011 will refuse to have anything to do with it (note: please see Addendum 2 at the bottom of this post for some clarification of this statement).

I note that, on my WHS V1 server, my Movies shared folder is already at 1.86TB. Just a few more Blu-rays added to my library, and I won’t be able to use WHS 2011 without having to sit down and plan my storage, both for now, and in the future, very, very carefully.

And this, to me, is the bottom line. WHS 2011 seems to force me to think like an IT support person; far, far more than WHS V1 ever did (or does!). That’s why I continue to think that the current WHS team don’t understand the home market sufficiently for WHS 2011 to succeed.

Addendum 1: It just gets worse. It turns out that the 2TB limit doesn’t just apply to the size of a backup disc, but also to the maximum amount of server storage that you can backup for offsite storage. I don’t believe it!  Update 31 March 2014: It appears as though there has been some improvement made to the Server Backup function in the Dashboard since I originally wrote this article. It remains the case that WHS 2011 continues to use the VHD format for backup, which has a maximum capacity of 2TB. However, it now appears (contrary to what Microsoft originally stated) as though the Server Backup function can now deal with multiple VHDs, providing the backup drive is big enough. So, if your backup drive is 4TB, that means you can have 2 VHDs of 2TB created on it. That, in turn, means that you can backup up to 4TB of data from your data storage drives (with a maximum of 2TB for any one drive). That’s a theoretical maximum, since Microsoft also recommend having some free space in the VHDs to handle incremental backups.

Addendum 2: Above, I wrote that: “you can’t even backup a client computer that has a disc of more than 2TB assigned as one contiguous space”. It turns out that’s too sweeping a statement. It was clarified by a discussion in the comments, and it’s worthwhile repeating the main points here in the blog entry itself.

The issue is that you cannot Backup and then Restore a GPT OS drive with Windows Home Server. You can backup a GPT with v1 and perform the Restore but the disk will not boot. You can Restore individual files from a GPT backup but again not the OS into a bootable device.

For WHS 2011, Microsoft’s release notes state:

“If a client computer is running Windows Home Server 2011, and it has a hard disk that is configured to use the GUID Partition Table (GPT) format, you cannot use back up or restore data from the operating system, individual files, or folders on that computer. However, you can restore individual files or folders from other computers to a client computer that uses GPT formatting.

In the event that a client computer is configured to use GPT hard disks, you must employ an alternative method to back up or restore that computer”.

[Update 4th March 2013: Microsoft has at last issued a Hotfix to add backup support for UEFI-based computers to back up to servers that are running Windows Home Server 2011]

Addendum 3: There are other issues with the Server Backup function in WHS 2011 that I explore in depth here. Sigh.

Yes, this is yet another grumbling post about how the current Windows Home Server team just don’t seem to understand what the word “Home” means in the name of the product.

I decided that I’d take a closer look at the Release Candidate for Windows Home Server 2011. So, I’ve wiped out the Windows 7 installation on my HP TX2000 laptop, and installed the WHS 2011 RC on it. On the plus side, I appreciated the way in which the installation process recognised hardware that had been developed since the days of Windows Server 2003 (that WHS V1 was based on). The installation process was painless.

On the other hand, there are some losses if I compare what I would have with WHS 2011 versus what I had with the first version of WHS.

The major difference is of course the removal of the Drive Extender technology. Now, this has been done to death (but that doesn’t mean that it’s not important), however, let’s look beyond that.

I approach Windows Home Server from the perspective of a consumer who has computers in their home. I’m someone who wants to have two things:

1. backup to a centralised server of all the data in the individual computers, such that, in the event of a failure of any individual computer, I can quickly restore that computer to a running state with the most recent data and,
2. to have digital media (music, pictures, videos, movies) available throughout my home from the same centralised server, with connected devices sharing media as simply, and as directly, as possible.

And I want that centralised server to be easy to manage, with regular offsite backups being made to ensure that the integrity of that server for both shared media and the data of client computers is preserved.

All this must be done as simply as possible. I really don’t want to carry on being the IT guy in my household. If I fell under a bus tomorrow, I would want my nearest and dearest to be able to carry on without any special knowledge.

And there’s the rub. While WHS V1 was certainly not perfect in this respect, it seems to me to be light-years ahead of the retrograde step of WHS 2011.

As I said, let’s ignore the elephant in the room, the Drive Extender technology, for the moment. Let’s just look at managing storage on WHS 2011.

In WHS V1, you could look at the shared folders to see how much space they currently took up. Here’s an example from my WHS V1 system:

And here’s the equivalent screenshot from WHS 2011:

Er, where’s the “used space” column? Well, surprise! It isn’t there. Instead, you have a “Free space” column that represents the space available on an individual drive. Nowhere near as useful. Because drive extender has been removed, the support person has to start thinking in terms of individual drives, not in terms of the total amount of storage as in WHS V1.

This mode of thinking in terms of individual drives, instead of the total storage pool is also reflected when considering backups. WHS 2011 is unable to deal with backups (or discs) larger than 2TB.

Frankly, if I were designing the follow-on product from WHS V1, then it would seem to me to be essential that I would handle the situation where discs and backups would be larger than 2TB. After all, if I’m going to claim that:

Today large hard drives of over 1TB are reasonably priced, and freely available. We are also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate, where 2Tb drives and more are becoming easy [sic] accessible. Since customers looking to buy Windows Home Server solutons [sic] from OEM’s will now have the ability to include larger drives, this will reduce the need for Drive Extender functionality.

…then I would make sure that a 2TB limit did not exist in my product. Not so with WHS 2011.

I really do wonder who the team are designing the product for. Certainly not home users.

I see that Paul Thurrott, in an article published on his Supersite for Windows, has done a U-turn and is now betting on Windows Home Server 2011. Back in October 2010, when he was first told by the current WHS team that they would be removing the Drive Extender technology from WHS 2011, his first reaction was that:

“Removing Drive Extender was the equivalent of driving a dagger right through the heart of the product”.

Indeed, that was my first reaction on hearing the news when it became public a month later, and the reaction of many, if not most, of us who had bought the original version of Windows Home Server.

Despite the outcry (for example, there are currently 5,581 votes in favour of retaining the DE technology in WHS 2011 versus 73 against over at the Microsoft Connect site – tagline: your feedback improving Microsoft products), the technology will not be put back into the final WHS 2011 product. (Addendum: on the 12 March 2011, Microsoft removed all the suggestions that had been posted by WHS 2011 beta testers in the connect forum, including this one. An act that reminded me of the Soviet’s airbrushing ex-politicos out of photographs. One way of removing embarrassing facts, I suppose)

So now, Paul Thurrott has put his sense of disappointment behind him, and written that:

So yes, I’m disappointed about Drive Extender, I really am. And yes, I’ve sweated this decision for months. But when the final version of Windows Home Server 2011 appears in the months ahead, I’m switching. And I’ll let you know how it goes, of course. But I can tell you now that Microsoft’s home server solution is still the best game in town, even with the removal of Drive Extender. And if you could stop crying into your beer, I think you’ll admit the same.

Well, perhaps. But what I find most telling about this whole debacle has been the way that it has been (mis)handled by Microsoft. It seems clear, from Thurrott’s own account, that the current WHS team did not have a clue, at least in the beginning, that the decision to remove DE would have such a negative reaction.

In effect, the team had just torn up the guiding principles for the product developed by Charlie Kindel and the original WHS V1 team – but they don’t seem to have appreciated that fact, or the likely reaction from customers who had bought V1 on the strength of those principles.

The team then soldiered on with the decision – and I have to give them credit for their brass necks – and very probably have weathered the storm. But I really could have done without the disingenous posts on their blog telling us that they were only following feedback from their customers:

“When weighing up the future direction of storage in the consumer and SMB market, the team felt the Drive Extender technology was not meeting our customer needs”.

There are some good things remaining in WHS 2011, but the heart of WHS V1 – its provision of consumer-friendly storage – has been surgically removed.

The die has been cast – we’ll see what happens.

Oh dearie me, Microsoft has just unleashed the Release Candidate of Windows Home Server 2011 upon the world. And as they had promised, they have surgically removed the one unique selling point that WHS version 1 had – the drive extender technology.

Frankly, this confirms to me that Microsoft has totally lost the plot when it comes to crafting consumer technology that ordinary people – as opposed to IT experts – actually feel comfortable about having.

They are, of course, putting their spin on how WHS 2011 will be wonderful, but it all has the air of them trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and failing miserably. Take, for example, this YouTube video that they put up to show us how to manage our storage in WHS 2011. With WHS version 1, when your storage was getting full, you could just add another drive and carry on. Now, as this video painfully points out, you have to worry about whether you need to move your folders around to rebalance your storage across your discs.

Hello, Microsoft, wake up – Mr or Ms average consumer doesn’t want to think like an IT support person.

I, for one, will be carrying on with WHS version 1 for as long as I possibly can. WHS 2011, with the removal of Drive Extender, has nothing to offer.