Share your "Home Server" setup

[Phillip Dyson]

Okay, I'm in the market for a home server solution for my house. My primary inspiration is backups. Others would be easily managed shared folders.

I have three computers in the house. One is mine, one is the my girlfriend's, and the other is my HTPC. I need something that allow me to easily and painlessly (relatively speaking) setup, manage and protect data across these various machines.

I'm looking at the Windows Home Server and it seems like it could fit the bill, but the more I dig, the more someone pops in an alternative.

Like this guy. (http://www.ezbluesoftware.com/littleblue.php)

I know that some people use online options, but I would like to exclude them for this discussion.

So if you've got a home server setup in your I'd like to hear about it.

thanks for you input.

[dcurtis987]

I don't know if you're still looking or not but I thought I would reply as it's better late than never. I use the HP home server with Windows Home Server on it. I have it loaded with 3.5 terabytes of storage and I love it. It does an automatic back up of each computer set up to get on the server (allows up to 10, I only have 6). It provides a way to share documents, photos, music or most any data to all the authorized computers. I’ve had it since November but I did experience a hardware failure 2 months ago. HP sent me a replacement and everything has worked fine after that. I plan to rip my DVD collection to the server then view the movies from my living room using XBOX360 as an extender. (WHS works very well with the server and allows you to view the pictures, listen to the music and videos from the server). I must confess, I bought the XBOX for my Grandkids but use it more as an extender from the MS media center and server.

[makicr]

Well, I have been thinking of building one myself. However, I fear that my eyes are bigger than my wallet.

What I have been looking at is the Chenbro (ES34069) case with the Wade-8656 motherboard.

You can look here for a discussion on build-your-own:
http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2786791&SiteID=50

[slugbug]

Running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 64 bit on my home server.

[Tony Rylow]

I'm running Windows Home Server with 1TB RAID-5. I love having a ton of storage space with protection from a single drive failure. The thing that I really like is the automatic backups that happen every day. It takes pretty much no effort to set up, and is very easy to restore. I kind of took the backups for granted until a few weeks ago when I hosed my Vista setup trying to dual-boot Ubuntu. Restore was nice and easy - pop in a cd, load the RAID drivers for my motherboard off a thumb drive, choose the partitions to restore and off it went.