Tag: WHS 2011

Once Upon A Time…

A long time ago, way back in 1999, a man by the name of Charlie Kindel had an idea: Microsoft was developing Windows for home PCs, why shouldn’t it develop Windows for a home server as well? His managers initially told him to focus on his real job, but his idea surfaced at CES in 2000 as a technology prototype called “Bedrock” focused on home automation and family applications. His idea went through more iterations until in February 2004, work began on a project called “Quattro” and that resulted in a product group to be formed in 2005 to produce what was to become Windows Home Server.

The first version of WHS was released to manufacturing in July 2007. I, along with thousands of others, had been testing the software at home prior to release. There were some issues that I found, but by the time of release, the majority had been resolved. Technically, it was pretty solid, but of course, Microsoft Management had got involved, and one of the potentially unique selling points had been removed. Despite being aimed at home users, remote access to your computers from outside the home wouldn’t work if you had home versions of Windows installed on your computers.

Apart from that castration by Management, WHS still had some very clever and innovative technology under the hood:

• Automatic backup of PCs that was both extremely efficient in terms of storage space needed (“Single-instance storage”), and which offered the “Time Machine” feature of being able to restore previous versions of files, or the whole PC, if required.
• The Windows Home Server Drive Extender: reliable, secure storage with a single namespace, that was transparently extendible.

I bought an OEM license for WHS in November 2007, and have been running WHS ever since; first the original version of WHS, and then WHS 2011, which was released in April 2011.

Windows Home Server 2011

WHS 2011 was not a straightforward improvement over the original WHS. Indeed, it dropped the major feature of the WHS Drive Extender, much to the dismay of WHS customers. There had also been organisational changes at Microsoft; the original product team had been part of the Windows product group, now it found itself lumped in with the big boys of the Business Server Group.

I had the distinct impression, watching the development of WHS 2011 and testing the betas over the months leading up to April 2011, that things were not going well with WHS 2011. As I wrote at the time: 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 threw that chance away.

So WHS 2011 turned out to be something of a damp squib, with some features that had obvious design shortcomings or that never worked properly – hello, Media Library, I’m looking at you… Even the new server backup feature of WHS 2011 had a design shortcoming that took my breath away.

Despite these shortcomings of WHS 2011, the positives still managed (just) to outweigh the negatives for me, so I migrated from WHS V1 to WHS 2011. I had built a dedicated server to hold all our media collections (CDs, DVDs, Blurays), and the backups from all the other PCs in the house. With the installation of WHS 2011, the server itself was being backed up using off-site storage.

The End Is Nigh

However, it was clear that Microsoft no longer loved Windows Home Server, and it was no surprise when Microsoft announced in July 2012 that there would be no next version of WHS. That meant, according to Microsoft’s Product Support Lifecycle rules, that WHS 2011 would continue to receive mainstream support until April 2016. Well, hello, that’s just two short months away. Thus, I needed to prepare a contingency plan.

Making The Move

I could have replaced the server hardware with an off-the-shelf NAS, but it seemed to me that would be an unecessary waste of good hardware. Instead, I could just change the software environment and keep the hardware intact. Not feeling inclined to go to the dark side (i.e. Linux), or for shelling out for a copy of Microsoft’s Windows Server Essentials (at ten times the price of WHS), I decided the best approach would be to use Windows 10 Pro in headless mode (i.e. without an attached monitor, mouse or keyboard). The WeGotServed site publishes a useful guide on how to do this, called, not unexpectedly, Building A Windows 10 Home Server. Whilst I think I could have got by without purchasing this guide, it does cover the entire process from a to z, hardware and software. I found it useful as a refresher of my knowledge, and for someone who is new to the idea of building their own server, it would be invaluable.

The problem is that Windows 10 is not Windows Home Server. In particular, the feature of automatically backing-up client PCs to the server is substantially different in Windows 10, and it is not an improvement.

Instead of WHS’s automatic backup of client PCs to single-instance storage, we have, not one, but two backup technologies to choose from in Windows 10 – and neither of them are ideal. Windows 10 offers:

• File History backup
• Backup and Restore (Windows 7)

File History Backup

While there’s a lot to like about the Windows 10 File History feature, it only focuses on the user’s personal data. It will only backup data held in the user’s Libraries, Desktop, Contacts and Favourites. It will completely ignore applications that have their own databases, e.g. Adobe’s Lightroom. For some years, Microsoft has been telling developers to store application data in locations contained in the C:\ProgramData folder, and now the File History feature will totally ignore such files. Also, user data that is not document-based is supposed to be held in locations contained in the C:\Users\Username\AppData folder. That is also ignored by the File History feature. It turns out that Microsoft’s own Windows 10 Mail App stores mail messages in the AppData folder, so File History will not backup your mail messages. Microsoft seems to be assuming that we store all our mail in the Cloud, e.g. in their Outlook.com service. Not everyone does.

Also, unlike the elegant and simple-to-use client PC Backup function of Windows Home Server (which covers all files and also provides a bare-metal restore), File History does not use single-instance storage. So if a new version of a file changes even by one bit, the entire file is backed up as an entirely new copy onto your backup disc. It’s very inefficient and wasteful of storage.

Backup and Restore (Windows 7)

As the title suggests, this technology is a legacy from earlier versions of Windows. It also works in a completely different manner from File History (or the Backup/Restore feature in WHS). It is a System Image backup utility, that is, the entire contents of the PC are backed up in one go – a snapshot of how your entire PC looked like at the point in time when you made the backup.

Whilst it’s useful to be able to make a snapshot in time of your PC, the WHS client PC can do this and more: it also allows you to restore individual files, and from different time points in their lives.

The fact that Microsoft has clearly marked this Backup and Restore technology as deprecated makes me wary. I would not be suprised to see it removed entirely from future versions of Windows 10.

Backup/Restore – What To Do?

Given that neither of the backup offerings in Windows 10 can match the simple and elegant solution of WHS, if I’m going to have to use Windows 10, what can be done? I suppose one route would be to purchase a separate backup and restore application. I’ll keep an eye out for that, but in the meantime, my approach will be to use the File History route to backup my personal data (documents, pictures and so forth), and manually including a specific list of application databases (e.g. Adobe Lightroom, Photo Supreme, etc.) to be covered by File History. For my email folders, I will make sure that all my email is automatically forwarded to an Outlook.com account as backup.

It’s not simple or elegant, but a kludge. Thank you Microsoft; one step forward, two steps back, as usual.

Pulling the Trigger

I could have stuck it out and carried on with WHS 2011 until at least April 2016. However, I’ve invested in a piece of server software that, it turns out, does not run well on WHS, but requires Windows 10. It is RoonServer. As a result, I have migrated from running WHS 2011 on our server to running Windows 10.

The migration was pretty straightforward, and all the media libraries and server software are now running quite happily under Windows 10. I miss the ease of WHS and its backup capabilities, but Microsoft has stuck the dagger in its back in the interests of getting us all to move to the Cloud. It’s a great pity – despite all the song and dance about Cloud services, I am still firmly of the opinion that there is a place for a server in the home. Online streaming where I am in the rural Netherlands is neither fast enough, stable enough, nor cheap enough to be considered a viable alternative.

Addendum, 27 February 2016: I see that Microsoft’s SBS group has just published a survey to ask the user community for feedback on the features of Windows Server Essentials to help them prioritise their planning for the next version. I left a comment:

Looking through the questions in the survey, it is very clear that you are targeting a particular group of business users. For those of us who grew up with Windows Home Server, and who mourn its passing, there is nothing to see here. Our feedback is clearly of no importance to your plans.

The comment is currently stuck in moderation. We’ll see whether it emerges and gets published. And, of course, it never did get published… Perhaps the truth hurts too much, or more likely, they couldn’t give a damn.

I’ve been using Microsoft’s Windows Home Server since 2007. In the years that it’s been installed, it’s been doing sterling work, acting as our server for digital media around the house, and also being responsible for taking nightly backups of our other computers. Unfortunately, the motherboard in our homebuilt server developed a fault, so that was all the excuse I needed to replace the old motherboard with a modern Intel Haswell-based design. I chose an ASUS H87I-Plus board, since it had six SATA ports and also came with an Intel controller for the Ethernet LAN interface to the network. The previous board had a RealTek LAN controller, and while it worked, I kept reading that the Intel design was better. So I decided to switch.

That decision caused a few hours of cursing.

Replacing the old motherboard with the new one was straightforward, and being a mini-ITX form factor, it is smaller than the old board, gives more room in the case and should be more energy-efficient. After booting it up into the BIOS to check that the hardware was all working as expected, I began to install Windows Home Server 2011. At first, everything went as expected, but then the installation process halted with an error – there was no driver installed for the Ethernet LAN controller.

No problem, thought I, I have all the necessary software on the CD that ASUS supply with the motherboard. I quickly located the folder for the LAN drivers, and started the setup procedure. First of all, the ASUS setup software refused to run because it discovered that it was on a machine running WHS 2011 instead of Windows 7 or Windows 8. So I dug down a bit and located the Intel setup software and started that running directly. After accepting the license agreement and a few screens marking the progress, everything came to a grinding halt when the setup stated that it wasn’t going to install the necessary drivers on this machine.

Fighting a rising sense of panic, I went to Intel’s download site, and downloaded the necessary drivers straight from there. Trying to install these produced the same result – no network drivers were installed.

A search on the internet produced the reason why.

Intel have decided that consumers should not be running a “server” operating system on a chipset that Intel deem to be for the consumer market. Intel have the i217-V (desktop) and i217-LM (server) versions of their gigabit Ethernet chip. They are in fact the same chip. The only difference is that the –V variant has support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 (desktop operating systems) while the -LM variant has support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012, i.e. server operating systems. Unfortunately, Microsoft built WHS 2011 (which is intended for the consumer market) on top of Windows Server 2008. So when the driver installation software detected  that it was running on a “server” operating system, and the motherboard had the consumer variant of the Ethernet chip, then it simply refused to install the driver.

Fortunately, the same search produced a solution. Ivo Beerens has a post on his blog describing this situation, and giving a solution – a few simple edits to an Intel configuration file. I was able to follow his instructions and have successfully installed the driver. WHS 2011 has now been able to connect to the network and complete its installation. It’s now downloading and installing a further 120 updates to itself. Hopefully, I will have been able to complete the rebuild of the server by the end of the weekend…

Thanks to Ivo, and no thanks at all to Intel.

Six years ago, along with 10,000 other people, I started testing the beta of the first version of Windows Home Server. When it was formally released in November 2007, I bought the software and built my first home server. I repeated this cycle for the next version of Windows Home Server: trying the beta, and then buying the product. Despite my many rants about the shortcomings of Windows Home Server 2011 and Microsoft’s lackluster support, overall I’ve been very satisfied with the product. It does its job of taking automatic backups of itself and our other computers in the house, and is the central storage for our collection of music, film, video and recorded TV programmes.

However, it was clear that Microsoft no longer loved Windows Home Server, and it was no surprise when Microsoft announced in July 2012 that there would be no next version of WHS. That means, according to Microsoft’s Product Support Lifecycle rules, that WHS 2011 will continue to receive mainstream support until April 2016.

That notwithstanding, Microsoft has also just told its band of enthusiasts in the WHS community of users that as from April 2014, WHS will be fully retired as an award expertise and technical interest. They do seem in an awful hurry to dispose of all trace of Windows Home Server.

It’s a great pity – despite all the song and dance about the move to Cloud services, I am still firmly of the opinion that there is a place for a server in the home. Online streaming where I am in the rural Netherlands is neither fast enough, stable enough, nor cheap enough to be considered a viable alternative.

Despite some quirks and shortcomings, my Windows Home Server system has been quietly backing itself up onto a pair of hard drives that I rotate to an off-site location.

But four days ago, the server backups started failing. The error being reported was “There is not enough space on the disk”. This was being reported for both the G: and the D: drives on my system.

Well, I could understand that being the case for the G: drive, since that had filled up with data leaving only 60 GB free on a 1 TB drive. However, the D: drive had nearly 385 GB free on a 405 GB drive.

I wondered whether in fact the disk being referred to was not the data disk, but the backup disk, WHS Data Backup #1, which only had a few GB free. WHS 2011 is supposed to purge old backups from the backup drives when they get full, but there seems to be no way to predict when it will do this – I’ve had backup drives bob along for months with only a few GB free.

I tried a few more server backups, but as you can see from the screenshot, they were all unsuccessful. I also swapped the backup drive for a second drive (WHS Server Backup #2b), but as you can see, server backups still weren’t working.

I began to wonder whether it was data drive G: being almost full that was triggering the failure, so I moved one of the Shared Folders from the G: drive to the J: drive. Unlike WHS v1, WHS 2011 does not have drive pooling, so you have to manage the storage as a bunch of separate drives.

Once I’d moved the Folder across to the J: drive (using the “Move the Folder” task in the WHS 2011 Dashboard), the G: drive now had 248 GB of free space, while the J: drive now had 714 GB of free space.

I tried another server backup. This was also unsuccessful, with an “Element not found” error (whatever that means) being reported on the J: drive.

I left the system running and waited to see whether the next scheduled backup (at 23:00) would work. That was also reported as unsuccessful, with all drives reporting a “The operation failed because another operation was in progress. Retry the operation” error.

Trying not to panic, I rebooted the system and tried one more time. Now I got a “The handle is invalid” error on all drives. Another mysterious and opaque message.

Finally, in desperation, I told WHS 2011 to remove the WHS Data Backup #1 drive from the server backup definition, and added it back as though it was a totally new backup drive. WHS 2011 formatted it, and I gave it the name of WHS Backup Disc #1a.

The next time server backup ran, the backup was successful. Phew!

I suspect I’m going to have to reformat the second backup drive, and add it back into the server backup task as a new drive.

I think things are back to normal again, but I have to confess that this little episode has shaken my confidence in WHS 2011 a bit.

Last June, I wrote about the fact that Windows Home Server 2011 was overwriting the metadata contained in media files. In August, Microsoft finally acknowledged the issue.

Yesterday, Microsoft issued the second Update Rollup for WHS 2011. It contains a fix for the metadata issue (issue 2 in the list of fixes).

Now, WHS 2011 will no longer retrieve metadata from the internet and use it to overwrite your music files by default. With the update, it has become an option that can be turned on or off. The setting is found on the Media Settings page of the WHS 2011 Server Settings (the “Retrieve additional information from the Internet” checkbox).

You’ll see from the screenshot that I have the retrieve function turned off, that’s because the last thing I want is for Microsoft to overwrite all my carefully set up metadata in my Music library.

In fact, installing this update has changed the default behaviour. Whereas before, metadata was always retrieved (it could not be turned off in the Server Settings) and used to overwrite files, the new default is for the retrieve function to be turned off. Microsoft have also implemented a new alert, which appears if the retrieve function is turned off:

I think the change to the default behaviour was the right thing for Microsoft to do. Suppose that they had not changed the default. Then I suspect those people who are blithely unaware of the metadata update task (and the likely damage it’s doing) would continue to be blithely unaware. And new users, having set up their brand new WHS 2011 installations, would also be unaware of the danger.

At least this way, everyone who has, up until now, been unaware of this issue is now going to get this alert, which hopefully will prompt them to think about the metadata issue. They now have the choice to either set the “ignore the alert” switch, or revert to turning the update task back on.

I just wish that Microsoft had bothered to update their WHS 2011 Help pages about this issue. They still say nothing about it (or even about the newly-implemented checkbox). This is not helpful for the “Home user”…

Oh, and I think I should add that none of the many other issues with the Media Library in WHS 2011 listed in this post have been resolved. They are all still there, making the use of the Media Library via the Web totally useless as far as I’m concerned…

If you were (or are!) using the original version of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server, you will probably have noticed that the WHS icon in the System tray changed colour to provide notifications at-a-glance:

• Green – your home network is healthy
• Yellow – your home network is at risk
• Red – your Home Server has found a critical problem
• Blue – your PC is currently being backed-up to the Home Server
• Grey – your Home Server is offline or unreachable

If you’re now running Windows Home Server 2011, then the WHS icon (now the Launchpad icon) no longer shows this range of notifications. Basically, you now have a choice of one colour: green. Green now simply means that the Launchpad is running.

However, the Getting Started Guide for WHS 2011 still shows the WHS v1 colour notifications as being present in WHS 2011:

Not surprisingly, some people, reading this document, thought that they had found a bug, and reported it as such over at the Microsoft Connect web site (note: if you aren’t registered at this site, you won’t be able to see the actual bug report).

Microsoft did their “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” trick and replied that:

we decided in the 2011 release that backups should be seamless and not neccessarily [sic] notify the user of when they are in place

and said that it would not be fixed. This is all very well, but it ignores the wishes of those folks who found that the additional notifications, particularly of backups, are extremely useful. It also points up Microsoft’s rather sloppy approach to the documentation of WHS 2011.

Since Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have declined to fix what many see as a bug, I’m pleased to report that a third party has stepped forward instead.

Jerry Wade has developed a utility (Home Server Status) for your Desktops and Laptops that indicates when a backup is in progress. Plus, it does a few other nifty things as well.

Check it out here.

I installed it and stopped using Microsoft’s Launchpad application, and have never looked back. I can thoroughly recommend it to ex-WHS v1 users who think that WHS 2011 has lost the plot with its bloated Launchpad application. And for those WHS 2011 users who are new to all of this, you could do worse than to check HSS out.

As you may be aware, I’m not very happy with the Media Library in Windows Home Server 2011. As well as the shortcomings and design issues that I wrote about here, it also turned out that WHS 2011 has a tendency to corrupt music metadata and Album art stored in the Music Library.

In one of the discussions about these issues that went on in various forums, I came across a reference to an application called Bliss. It’s an application that seeks out Album covers online and will download and install them into your music collection automatically.

Since WHS 2011 had blithely overwritten all my carefully-prepared high-resolution Album art with its own low-resolution versions, I thought that I would give Bliss a whirl to see if it could repair the damage wreaked by WHS 2011.

To cut to the bottom line, Bliss does what it says on the tin, and I can recommend it; but there are a few quirks to be aware of if you want to use it to maintain Album art on a WHS 2011 system.

What follows is the detail of what I did and what I found…

While Bliss can be installed and run on WHS 2011, it is not packaged as a true Add-in application for WHS 2011. Add-ins are designed to be downloaded onto your Desktop PC or your Laptop, and installed onto your WHS 2011 from there. Once installed, the Add-in appears in the WHS 2011 Dashboard, where the application can be accessed and controlled. Bliss, on the other hand, is packaged as a traditional application. Once installed and started, it runs in the background and is accessed and controlled via your web browser. This means that it can be installed on your Desktop, your laptop, or the home server. Once running, you can point Bliss at the location of your Music Library, and it will go to work.

To install Bliss on WHS 2011, you need to open up a Remote Desktop Connection to your WHS 2011 system to gain access to the Administrator’s Desktop on the server. From there, you can double-click on the Bliss Setup program, and it will be installed on the server. Since it is installed in a server environment, it is best that it is running as a Windows service. That way, it will automatically start up when the server is booted – you won’t need to manually start it. Full instructions on how to install it as a Windows service are given on the Bliss web site here.

Once Bliss is running (either as a Windows service, or by being started manually), then access to the functions of Bliss is done via a web browser. If Bliss is running on your Desktop, then accessing Bliss is done via the URL: http://localhost:3220. However, if it is running on your WHS 2011, then you’ll need to point your Desktop PC web browser to http://Servername:3220, where Servername is the name of your server.  And here comes the first quirk. When I tried that, the web browser failed to find the Bliss web page.

The reason is that installing Bliss on WHS 2011 does not automatically add in a Firewall rule to allow access via the 3220 TCP port. I needed to once again open up a Remote Desktop Connection to my WHS 2011 system to gain access to the Administrator’s Desktop on the server. From there, I used the Windows Firewall Management applet to create a new TCP port rule to allow inbound access to port 3220:

I also made sure that this rule was only valid for my Home (private) network:

Now, to me, all this remote accessing of the Administrator’s Desktop of the WHS 2011 system in order to install the program (preferably as a Windows service) and configure the firewall stretches beyond what I think the average Home User can reasonably be expected to cope with. It is OK for those of us who are comfortable rummaging about under the hood, but not, I think, for your average Home User who really wants to view WHS 2011 as a backup and storage appliance for his or her digital media. The design principle of WHS 2011 should be that such a user can access and control all the necessary functionality of the system via the WHS 2011 Dashboard. The system should be simple to install, run and maintain.

For Bliss to fit this paradigm, it would be necessary for it to be available as a true WHS 2011 Add-in. Since it’s not available in this form, if you are going to install it on your WHS 2011 system, you have to know what you’re doing, and feel comfortable about rummaging in the innards of WHS 2011.

Please don’t think that I’m casting aspersions on the developer because Bliss is not a WHS 2011 Add-in. Turning Bliss into a proper WHS 2011 Add-in can be a major development and rewrite project, and frankly, given the less than stellar impact WHS 2011 has had in the market, I doubt that the monetary returns would justify the work for many applications such as Bliss.

Given all the above, then if you are just an ordinary Home User who wants to have a nifty Album art application for your music collection on your WHS 2011 system, then what should you do? My recommendation would be simply to install it on your Desktop PC or Laptop, and use it from there. You can point Bliss to your music library on your WHS 2011 system and everything’s hunky-dory.

Well, almost.

Remember that I said that WHS 2011 corrupts Album art? The reason is that, by default, WHS 2011 runs a scheduled task every 24 hours to replace what you think the Album art should be with what Microsoft thinks it should be.

That’s bad enough, but even worse is that when this task replaces your high-resolution Album art file with its crappy low-resolution version, it sets the attributes of the file to “Hidden” and “System”. A file with these attributes cannot be updated by Bliss – any attempt to do so will generate an “Access denied” error.

So, I’m afraid that even if you are just an ordinary Home User, you will still need to use a Remote Desktop Connection to your WHS 2011 system to do three things:

1. Stop and delete that damned scheduled task (then reboot your server).
2. Go to the root folder of your Music Library and search for all files named Folder.jpg in the root folder and subfolders.
3. Delete all the Folder.jpg files in your search result.

Then Bliss will be free to do its stuff and supply decent quality Album art where it can.

You know, it’s somewhat ironic that Microsoft has shot itself in the foot here. Far from supplying an operating system that can form the basis of a backup and storage appliance, the shortcomings of WHS 2011 are often working against that goal. Applications such as Bliss are in danger of being subject to collateral damage through no fault of their own.

I’m happy to continue to use Bliss, because, as I said, it does what it says on the tin. I just have to keep an eye on WHS 2011, because it often does not.

Now that I’ve been running my Windows Home Server 2011 system for a while, I’ve been able to observe some of the behaviours and quirks that require time to show themselves. Here are my notes on the server backup function.

As you are probably aware, WHS 2011 can only take a backup of the server data that is 2TB or less in size, and can only handle backup drives that are limited to 2TB.

[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.]

With this in mind, I have defined my server backup data set to consist only of what I think of as critical data: the server system itself, the client backup data, and a few other folders. This all adds up to around 610GB of data. I have two 1TB drives that I have designated as backup drives in the WHS 2011 system. I have a single-bay ICY Dock enclosure, and I rotate the two drives between the enclosure and an offsite storage location. I take backups twice daily, at 12:00 and 23:00 (this is the default setting for the server backup function of WHS 2011).

The first time I used each drive in the system, a full copy of the server backup dataset was written to the drive. This meant that each drive then had around 320 GB free capacity. After the first backup, only changes to the data are recorded in subsequent backups. Each time a backup was made, some of the 320GB free capacity was used up to hold these changes.

It is possible to define a retention policy for client computer backups (that is, how long the client computer backups will be kept before they are deleted and the space reclaimed for newer backups). See the following screenshot showing how the retention policy can be defined.

But the interesting thing is that there is no equivalent setup screen to define the retention policy for server backups. So the question naturally arises: what happens when the backup drives used for the server backups become full?

Over on the WHS forums, some folks say that WHS 2011 will automatically clear out old backups once a backup drive fills up, but others have reported that it doesn’t always happen; thus, it’s a bit unclear.

So I was curious to see what would happen as time went on, and my backup drives got full.

The first thing that happened, about a week ago, was that I received an alert to say that one of my backup drives had less than 10% of free space:

You’ll notice that the only possibilities offered by this alert to resolve the issue are either to replace the drive with a larger one, or to cut down on the size of the server backup. Neither of these options were particularly attractive, and nothing is said about the possibility of deleting older backups. So I thought I would just carry on and see what would happen.

I got to the situation today when drive #1 had less than 6GB free space left. I triggered a further backup manually to see what would happen. The backup was successful, and then I saw that the drive had 320 GB free. WHS 2011 had deleted all the backups from the drive and created a fresh complete backup. Drive #1 then had one backup on it.

That means that drive #1 now holds one server backup, time stamped today (23rd July). Drive #2 currently holds 38 server backups dating back to 14 June (one full backup plus 37 incremental changes). Once drive #2 runs out of space I expect the same thing to happen; all the old backups will be deleted and a new server backup will be taken. At that point, my earliest server backup will be today’s backup (23rd July) on drive #1.

I see one slight quirk in all of this. If I look at the server properties in the WHS 2011 Dashboard, and examine the Backup tab, I see this:

Notice how it is listing backups taken to drive #1 that are now no longer available. If I compare this with the list that is given by the Windows Server Backup screens in the underlying Windows Server 2008 Server Manager (which your average Home User would never see or be aware of), then I see this:

In other words, all the backups taken to drive #1 that were deleted in order to make room for today’s backup have also now been removed from this list. Up until this point, they would have been shown. I would argue that this list is a more accurate reflection of the actual situation than the list shown in the WHS 2011 Dashboard information.

If I then ask WHS 2011 to show me what backups are available for restoring, then it doesgive me an accurate picture:

The dates shown in bold before the 23rd July are for the backups held on drive #2 – it shows that there are no backups available for the 20th and 21st July, for example. There were backups taken on this date, but they were taken to drive #1, and were subsequently deleted today when drive #1 ran out of space.

Depending on where you look in the Dashboard, you will get slightly different answers… Personally, I would prefer the list of backups to reflect the actual state of available backups, rather than state that backups that are no longer available were successful at the time. I don’t want to be lulled into a false sense of security.

Update 29 July 2011

Sigh. Murphy’s Law has struck. I wrote earlier in this post:

Once drive #2 runs out of space I expect the same thing to happen; all the old backups will be deleted and a new server backup will be taken.

Well, yesterday, Backup drive #2 ran out of space. And what happened? I got an error, and the backup failed…

Before the backup started, I had 3.1GB free space on the drive, so I was expecting WHS 2011 to realise that there wasn’t enough space for a backup, and to wipe the drive before starting with a complete new backup. After all, that’s what I think it did with drive #1.

No such luck.

Instead, it attempted to do a backup, and I got an alert saying that the scheduled backup did not finish successfully:

Notice that it’s given me an error code 2155348020, and, as I’ve written before:

I love the way that this message simply tosses out the fact that we should view the event log for more information. I think that most Home Users presented with this message would simply think: WTF is the Event log? And they can’t view the Event log via the WHS 2011 Dashboard anyway – you have to be sufficiently IT-savvy to be able to open up a Remote Desktop Connection and then start up the Event Viewer on the server.

Going to the Event Log, I see this message from the Backup application:

The backup operation that started at ‘‎2011‎-‎07‎-‎28T10:01:02.660930800Z’ has failed with following error code ‘2155348020’ (Windows Backup failed to create the shadow copy on the storage location.). Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.

The event details are given by a link to a Microsoft online help page for Windows Server 2008 R2, and it’s clearly written for IT support staff. To a Home User, it might as well be written in Martian.

Admittedly, it is fairly clear what the problem is – the backup drive does not have enough room to store the shadow copy – but the resolution doesn’t seem possible. As we’ve already established at the beginning of this saga, WHS 2011 has no way for a Home User to clear out old server backups, we seem to have to be reliant on WHS 2011 deleting the backups itself. And if it doesn’t do this, as appears to be the case here, we’re screwed.

A couple of other oddities I noticed with this failed backup. Even though it was reported as unsuccessful in the Alert viewer and here:

… if I click on the “View details…” button shown above, I am told that while the backup was unsuccessful, it does seem to have successfully backed up all the drives and folders that it was supposed to:

Something else that is a bit odd. I said that, going in to this backup, the drive had 3.1GB free. Now it has 9.6GB free. I’m not sure what to make of that…

I kicked off a manual backup of the server using drive #2, and this time it completed successfully. I’ve done a mixture of scheduled and manual backups since then, and they’ve all completed successfully. The amount of free space left on the backup drive varies between 0.7GB and 6GB. It’s currently at 1.7GB.

What it’s not doing, as was the case with drive #1, is to clear out all the old backups and start again.

I think I’ll just leave drive #2 in the system for the moment and see what happens. I would prefer that the system behave in predictable ways. I am unsettled by the fact that it seems to behave according to its own rules. Rules that Microsoft have never bothered to define. Perhaps, like me, they don’t know what they are…

Update 30 July 2011

Oh well, hitting a brick wall again. Last night’s backup proceeded without a problem, and I ended up with only 1.2GB free space on the backup drive. So I thought that when today’s backup kicked off at noon, WHS 2011 would have the nous to realise that it would need to clear out all the backups from the drive and start again (as it had done with drive #1).

Nope – I just got another error:

I then tried to see if doing a manual backup would clear out the backup drive…

Nope, the same error.

What now? I suppose I can try removing the drive from the server backup function and then re-attaching it as though it were a totally fresh drive… Right, so I select backup drive #2 and choose the “Remove the hard drive from Server Backup” task:

That then kicks off the Server Backup wizard…

Perhaps it’s just me, but this strikes me as a trifle confusing – I just want to remove the backup drive from the Server Backup, why do I have to trudge through this wizard again. Oh well, onwards…

Right, so I suppose I need to choose the “Change Server Backup settings” option. So let’s do that…

I assume that to remove backup drive #2, I will need to uncheck the first checkbox. As an aside, note how the offline backup drive (backup drive #1) is not given its user-friendly name (WHS Data Backup #1), but the internal gobbledegook that Windows Server 2008 R2 knows it by: \\?\Volume(b14d1287-95dd-11e0-a8fc-002354da5014). I’m sure this is perfectly obvious to your average Home User, of course.

I uncheck the first checkbox and click “Next”, only to be presented with this:

Well, yes, I know that; and the purpose of telling me this is? So I click on “OK”, and am returned to the screen before. Since I’m trying to remove the damn drive, I click on “Next” only to get this error message again. I’m now just bouncing back and forth between these two screens.

Sigh.

Perhaps the way out of this mess is to:

• Cancel out of this wizard
• Remove backup drive #2 manually from its dock
• Replace backup drive #1 into the dock (to get it online)
• Select backup drive #1 and then select “Remove the hard drive from Server Backup” to go through the damn wizard again, but this time select the now-offline backup drive #2 at the appropriate point.

You’ll note that even though WHS 2011 is telling me that it’s going to remove drive #1 from Server Backup, I have to do this in order to remove drive #2… Make sense? No, I thought not. OK, here we go…

Here we are back at the screen that caused the problem the last time around. Now, it’s backup drive #1 that’s online, and backup drive #2 (which is now offline and has its own gobbledegook name showing) that I need to deselect in order to remove it from the backup destination:

This time, I make it to the next screen, which has the existing name of backup drive #1 already filled in:

Clicking “Next” gets me to the schedule screen:

Then I get to choose what I want backed up (it’s already filled in with my last choices):

And at last I reach the confirmation screen, where I see that backup drive #2 is now removed.

Remember, that I started off from a screen that offered to remove backup drive #1 from Server backup; however, the design of WHS 2011 leads you into a dead-end if you assume that this is what it will remove. Did no-one spot this problem before product release?

It seems a very roundabout way of removing a backup drive. I also have my suspicions that we are not out of the woods yet.

Just because I’ve removed a backup drive from the backup schedule doesn’t necessarily mean that WHS 2011 has forgotten about it. Sure enough, if I start the server restore wizard, and look at available backups, it shows me backups that were taken on to drive #2:

So now, if I reformat backup drive #2 and add it back into the server backup schedule, will WHS 2011 continue to think that these backups are still available?

I added backup drive #2 into the server dock. WHS 2011 does not show it as an available disk:

Let’s try and add it back into the Server Backup schedule… I start the Customize Server Backup wizard and reach the “select the backup destination” screen. At first, I didn’t see the backup drive, only after I checked the “Show all disks that can be used as backup disks” did it appear as the first item in this screenshot:

I checked it (to add it into the list of backup destinations) and clicked “Next”.

FINALLY – I get a screen that acknowledges that WHS 2011 knows that this drive has been used for backups before:

I choose “No” and get a confirmation screen:

I chose “Yes” and got to give a name to the disk. I chose “WHS Data backup drive #2a”, since I’m curious to see whether WHS 2011 has now deleted all references to “WHS Data backup drive #2” from its list of available backups. Let’s check by starting the Server Restore wizard:

WHAT? Excuse me, I have backups taken on drive #1 available, don’t tell me you’ve deleted everything?

I hurriedly put in backup drive #1, and start the Server Restore wizard again. This time, I get further, and elect to choose the backup I want to restore from. If I choose a backup that was taken onto backup drive #1 (the one that’s currently plugged into the system), I get confirmation that the backup is online and available (in this case, the backup of 24th July at 23:00):

But, what’s this? WHS 2011 is still claiming that backups are available from backup drive #2 (e.g. the backup of 29 July at 23:00):

True enough, it’s saying that it’s offline, because the drive isn’t plugged into the system, but it’s still claiming that it’s available. Oh no it isn’t, says I, because you’ve just formatted that drive. Oh yes it is, replies WHS 2011…

Sometimes I feel as though I’m taking part in a Panto with WHS 2011…

So, to summarise. Removing a drive from Server Backup is not straightforward – the task design is flawed and leads you to a dead end. You can get WHS 2011 to reformat a backup drive, but it won’t go the extra mile with you and remove the previous entries for the deleted backups from its internal database. So it will quite happily lie to you about what backups are available…

Wonderful.

Just eight weeks after WHS 2011 became available to purchase, Microsoft have slashed the price. It’s now available to purchase for almost half of its original price. While I expected the price to fall, I didn’t think it would fall so far, so soon. I wonder whether Microsoft are trying to cut their losses on this?

As someone has just said on a forum, WHS 2011 looks as though it’s becoming the Microsoft Bob for this era…

Yes, I know I’ve complained about the poor quality of the support documentation for Windows Home Server before (here, here, and here), but I just keep finding more examples.

The latest is the Solution Center page for Windows Home Server 2011 in the Microsoft Support web site.

 

It says at the top: “Windows Home Server 2011” and “The solution center applies to current versions of Windows Home Server” (i.e. Windows Home Server 2011). According to the page, it was last reviewed by Microsoft, presumably for correctness, on June 22nd, 2011.

Yet, if you click the link for the Windows Home Server product guide, what you will get is the Product Guide that was issued for version 1 of Windows Home Server in January 2009. So, not for Windows Home Server 2011, then.

And under the Learning More section, the penultimate link should really read “Monitor the health…” not “Monitors the health…” Yes, it’s a little thing, but it seems to me to be indicative of a continuing lack of attention to quality of product.

I see that Microsoft’s Michael Leworthy has posted that the latest update of the “Getting Started With Windows Home Server 2011” document is now available. This version is dated June 2011, and replaces an earlier one dated February 2011.

It’s a pity, therefore, to report that errors that were present in the February version are still there in the June edition. For example, take this page:

In the Pre-Defined Shared Folders section, it states:

Your home server is pre-configured with the following shared folders: Pictures, Music, Videos, Documents, Recorded TV and Users. From the Windows Home Server 2011 Dashboard you can specify the user permissions for these folders and create a number of new shared folders.

Wrong. In WHS 2011, the pre-defined shared folders are: Client Computer Backups, Documents, Music, Pictures, Music, Recorded TV, and Videos (as can be seen in the screenshot immediately above in the Guide). In the original version of WHS, the pre-defined folders were Photos, Music, Videos, Public, and Software. In addition, every user who had an account created on WHS would automatically have a folder created for them; e.g. user Geoff would have a folder  \\server\users\geoff. In WHS 2011, these user folders are no longer created automatically, so there is no “users” folder.

At the end of the Guide, there is a section on Resources that are available to help you with WHS 2011:

Unfortunately, the links given for Installation Instructions and General Help are still mistakenly swapped (doesn’t anyone at Microsoft check this stuff?). The link under Installation Instructions takes you to the General Help pages, and the link under the General Help pages takes you to the online Release Notes (which contain the latest Installation Instructions).

I’ve commented on the poor quality of the General Help pages before (both here on the blog, and in feedback direct to Microsoft); unfortunately, as far as I can see, they are still unchanged and as bad as ever. The WHS 2011 Product Pages were supposed to be cleaned up this week also. As of today, they are still in the same chaotic state that they’ve had for a few weeks now.

Addendum 5th July 2011: I was browsing through the excellent We Got Served forums today, and noticed that someone had reported that the WHS 2011 notification icon in the Windows System Tray wasn’t turning blue when a backup of the PC was in progress. This was always the case in WHS v1, so I was surprised to read that it wasn’t apparently working in WHS 2011. It’s even mentioned in the Getting Started documentation:

 

Intrigued, I looked at the System Tray icon on a couple of my PCs whilst they were having a backup taken, and sure enough, it wasn’t turning blue. I then discovered that this bug had been reported to Microsoft on the Microsoft Connect web site (note, if you haven’t got an account there, you won’t be able to follow that link, I’m afraid). Astonishingly, Microsoft have replied:

This is a good suggestion, although we decided in the 2011 release that backups should be seamless and not neccessarily [sic] notify the user of when they are in place.

Ah, yes, the “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” defence. If they’re going to pull that one, then they should also change the documentation to be in line… And what on earth do they mean by describing this as “seamless”? “Invisible”, more like. The whole point of the icon behaviour in WHS v1 was that you could see at a glance whether a backup was in progress, so that you didn’t shut down your computer while it was underway. I’m already seeing complaints on the forums that people are missing this, and pointing out that it was very easy to use by family members. Now, you have to go into the Launchpad and click the backup button. If there’s no backup underway, the Launchpad will ask you if you want to start one. If there is one underway, the Launchpad will tell you how far it’s got. Family members don’t want this hassle (many don’t even want to see the Launchpad), and neither do I.

I’m sorry that I always seem to be negative about WHS 2011. I really want it to succeed, but it seems to me that the lack of attention to detail and the resulting slip in quality, not to mention the issues in the shipped software, does not generate a good impression of the product. It could have been so much better.

Update 13 January 2012: Well, it’s taken Microsoft over six months to do it, but it looks as though they now have a new set of Product Pages. They are very much simplified (perhaps too much so), but at least the howlers of the previous set are no more.

…

I’ve been looking through the web pages that Microsoft has put up to market the Windows Home Server 2011 product.

The web pages were originally set up for the first Windows Home Server product, and have now been updated, not always consistently or completely, to reflect the new, 2011, version.

For example, on this page, the “Find your files easily” and “Share photos, music, and videos” links are currently broken:

Other pages also have lots of broken links. This one, for example:

Update 18 July 2011: Well, it looks as though Microsoft have removed the broken links instead of fixing them. Originally (i.e. on the WHS v1 pages), those links led you to the full-size screenshots of the thumbnails to the left of each link. And the thumbnails themselves had embedded links to do the same thing. Now Microsoft have simply deleted all the links, both in the text and the thumbnails, so there is no way someone reading the product pages can see the full-size screenshots. Instead they have to be satisfied by squinting at the thumbnails. This is supposed to be good marketing?

And then there are pages that still continue to refer to the old version of Windows Home Server. This page, for example, still has screenshots of the WHS version 1, and it refers to the “Console” of WHS v1, instead of the “Dashboard” of WHS 2011:

And it’s not the only page to do this. There’s plenty of other examples to be found, including pages that refer to the Drive Extender technology, which has been dropped from WHS 2011.

Microsoft seem to be intent on not only confusing the home user, but also their developer community. On the Windows Home Server Support page, the link given under the Developer resources section leads not to the Windows Home Server MSDN site as it claims, but to a now-obsolete toolkit (it was designed for WHS v1 and will not work on WHS 2011) to install diagnostic software on WHS v1. Diagnostic software, note, not information about how to build software for WHS 2011, which is what developers need to get started with. The link should really go to the SDK (Software Development Toolkit) for WHS 2011.

Finally, I know that I’m a pedant about grammar, so I let out a groan of despair when I read this page:

Take a look at the tagline under the link to the official Blog of the Windows Home Server Team:

“You’re guide…”? Sigh – whatever happened to good education? Or useful and accurate web pages, for that matter?

As promised yesterday, here’s the follow-up post describing my experience (thus far) with the Media Library in Windows Home Server 2011.

On installation, Windows Home Server 2011 will create a number of Folders by default for music, pictures, documents, recorded TV, and videos. These can be accessed either via Windows networking, or via the web using the Remote Web Access facilities of WHS 2011.

On my home network, I’m using Windows networking for access by my Home Theatre PC (HTPC) and other computers to the digital media files held on my WHS 2011 system. This seems to be working as expected. I can play my music, or watch DVDs and Blu-rays streamed from the server to my PCs without issue.

I did, however, find a couple of wrinkles when trying to access the same digital media files via the Remote Web Access facility of WHS 2011.

Wrinkle 1

When I first set up my WHS 2011 system, I had installed my music library on drive D:. And, I could access my music in the Music library displayed via the Remote Web Access. However, after a few days, I thought that I should move my picture and video libraries to different drives. I used the “Move the folder” Wizard in the Dashboard to accomplish these tasks.

I then found that instead of being able to see in excess of 45,000 pictures in the Media Library, I was presented with the grand total of one picture:

I also saw that I had a total of 54 videos, but when I tried to play any of them, the web-based player would start, but then fail with an error message complaining that the file-type may not be supported.

Using Remote Web Access to browse the shared folders would show all the pictures, and would play the videos without problems.

I thought at first that it was simply a case of the index service needing time to register the new locations of my picture and video files, so I waited, and I waited… I waited a couple of days, and nothing changed.

At this point, I decided to reboot my server, and lo and behold, the picture and video files were found:

You will notice that there are now 45,058 pictures and 92 videos found, and that the thumbnails show a real photo and video thumbnail.

So I infer from this that using the “move folders” wizard is not sufficient to keep the WHS 2011 system running smoothly – it is also necessary to reboot the server in order for the indexing service to discover the new location of files. This, despite the fact that accessing the files via Windows networking appears to be able to account for the changes.

For the case of web access, the server’s left hand does not know what the right hand has done…

Wrinkle 2

I noticed, from the forums, that some people were complaining that their Album Art (CD covers) in their Music Library was showing up in their Pictures Library. Clearly, this is wrong, and should not be happening.

Then I realised that when the Pictures Library of WHS 2011 was showing just one picture, it was in fact a CD cover stored in my Music Library. Well, (a ) this should not be displayed in my Picture Library, but (b ) why was it just one? After all, my Music Library has 990 albums:

– why was it just displaying one album cover, and not 990 in the Picture Library?

It turns out that WHS 2011 will ignore certain filenames when it is searching for items for inclusion in the Picture Library.

WHS 2011 will ignore filenames in the Music Library folders when they have the form:

• AlbumArt_{alphanumeric}_Large,
• AlbumArt_{alphanumeric}_Small, AlbumArtSmall, and
• Folder.jpg files

However, if you have Album Art files that do not follow this convention, then WHS 2011 will count them in as part of the Picture Library.

And that’s what was happening. I had an Album Art cover file with this name:

Cover- Wiener Philharmoniker _Orchestra_- Strauss, R. Eine Alpensinfonie; Rosenkavalier-Suite.jpg

and so WHS 2011 included it into the Picture Library…

Sometimes I feel as though I’m an archaeologist, trying to second-guess what has been left by extinct civilisations…

Update: I have discovered more issues with the Media Library. See this post.