Jason Percival

Do NOT trust Windows Home Server

Despite what I said in this week’s Growing Up Geek episode. I have changed my mind.

It appears I have been bitten by the data corruption bug a lot harder then I originally thought. I have lost some about 45 artists worth of music, no big deal. But the thing I am having some trouble with right now is my 2.24TB of DVD files. Yes, that is about 450 DVDs that were stored on my server. It is going to take a long time to re-import them, and get everything set up the way it was.

My problem is that Microsoft markets the Home Server as a way for a family to store all there important digital files, and then discovers that there is a major flaw in the Volume Shadow Copy Service that is corrupting data stored on dual hard drive systems. If you use certain programs and edit the data stored on the server it causes some major problems. I personally would never edit files directly on the server, but I believe my problem came with Vista’s photo gallery. I would import my pictures directly to my pictures store on the Home Server. That way it was a quick direct import. But some pictures were rotated, so I would have to rotate them back. Well apparently that is what sets the bug in motion. Now mind you, I would have never done this if Microsoft had known about the bug earlier, but because they didn’t release the information until way after the product was out of Beta, and even out of the RC phase I had no way to tell. When I got my OEM copy of WHS I did a fresh install, so if I had the problem before hand from the preview copies, it would have been wiped out.

So now I sit here as I’ve invested a couple of hundred dollars in external terabyte drives, and waisting a lot of my valuable time trying to get as much data off of my server as possible before having to re-install the entire OS.

I personally hope there is going to be something done to alleviate the problems everyone in the world has been having with this problem. I have been a huge advocate of WHS since it’s launch, I’ve recommended it to at least 50 people at work, and to countless other people I’ve talked to. I can not imagine how many people have been affected by this, and how much data has been lost.