Manually migrating to a new Home Server

I’ve been using my trusty EX475 since roughly September of 2007 when I was working at HP and we wrapped up development of the very first MediaSmart server. This unit has served me very well over the past two years with no significant issues encountered (though I have had problems with network switches). Since this Home Server stores all my family photos and videos, my music collection, and the backups of all the computers in my house I’ve kept it fairly clean and refrain from doing any testing on it. I’m fortunate to have other servers for developing Add-Ins, testing and experimenting, and writing guides to help people learn to better use their Home Server.

Then the HP MediaSmart Server EX495 came along, tempting me with it’s dual core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 1.5TB hard drive and quieter power supply. After testing and experimenting with it for a few months I decided it was time to upgrade. I have previously discussed using Server Recovery to migrate to a new Windows Home Server, and Damian also had success using this method. However, some readers were uncomfortable using Server Recovery in this way, plus I wanted to take advantage of the 1.5TB system drive in the EX495 instead of reusing the 500GB system drive from my EX475. This led me to perform a manual migration of all my data from the old server to the new, and I documented this process to share with you.

My goal through this process was to end up with basically the same setup I had on my EX75, but with the new 3.0 HP software features and horsepower of the EX495. I also took advantage of this operation to perform some cleanup of the files stored on my server and managed to discard many gigabytes of old installer files that I’d saved, cleaned up some old backups, and performed some general housekeeping. I wanted to use the 750GB and 1TB Western Digital Green Power drives from the EX475 in the new server, and so I knew that I would have to move the data in stages.

I started by performing a Factory Reset on the EX495, went through the initial setup, created a couple of users, and added a 1TB Seagate drive for additional storage. At this point I didn’t want to store any backups on the server and I knew it would take a couple of days to perform the full migration, so I disabled the backups of the sole connected client PC. While this was going on I disabled the features and uninstalled most of the Add-Ins from the EX475, with the intent of limiting the possibility of any data changing on the old server while I was in the process of migrating my files to the new server.

I started off by moving the data from the smaller shares on my EX475 – 50GB of files from my user account and 60GB of family photos – leaving the large Videos shared folder that contains my DVD rips for last. I used Robocopy to transfer the files, as it is more robust than a simple Windows drag-n-drop file copy in that it will tolerate network hiccups and can even retry the copy if needed. Robocopy is included by default with Vista and Windows 7, but to get it on Windows Home Server (based upon Windows Server 2003) I had to install the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools.

I then used Robocopy on my primary Desktop PC to copy my 35GB CD collection from the PC to the new server (I keep the CD collection on my PC in addition to the server for easy sync to the Zune and iPod). I chose Robocopy over the Media Collector feature of the HP Software primarily because neither of the organization methods used by the Media Collector (by artist or by PC folder structure) exactly meet my needs.

After copying this data to the new server, and disabling Duplication on the older server I had freed up enough space to remove the 1TB Western Digital GP drive and was ready to move it over to the EX495. I used the Drive Removal feature of Windows Home Server, this took some time to move all the files off of the drive but it completed successfully. I then removed it from the EX475, installed it in the EX495, and used the Add Drive wizard to increase the capacity of the new server’s storage.

At this point I was ready to move the Client Backups from the EX475 to the new EX495. Note that if you choose to do this, it is critical to make sure that both the old and new server are at the same version of Windows Home Server in order to avoid the loss of your backups. You can verify the version of your server in the Home Server Console, under the Resources section of the Settings tab. To move the Client Backups I used my WHS Backup Database-Backup Add-In, and utilized the ability to backup to a network share to copy the Backup DB from the old server over the network to the new server. I started by installing BDBB on the old server, used the “Add Network Share” feature to map the Public share of the new server, and then created a new backup.

This took several hours to copy over gigabit network, I just left it running overnight. Once the copy had finished I installed BDBB on the new server and used the “Add Network Share” feature to map \\localhost\Public. It automatically found the BDBB backup from the EX475, I clicked Restore, then left it running for a few hours as it copied it into place. Note that I chose NO when prompted to restore the client registry keys, as Windows Home Server has improved it’s handling of unknown clients in the backup database and the client registry keys are usually no longer needed for restoration.

After this completed, all my client PCs from the old server were now present in the “Computers and Backups” tab of the EX495. I tested the Single File Restore feature on a few of the backups to make sure things were working well, and all looked good. I then enabled backups on the connected Client PC, and installed the new HP 3.0 client software and Windows Home Server Connector on all my PCs to join them with the new server.

At this point I decided to add my wife’s Macbook to the server. One of the limitations of the way the Mac backup feature of the MediaSmart Server works is that it requires contiguous available space for the backup file that you create and it must reside solely on a single drive in your system. I wanted to create this file to be used for backups while there was still a large amount of free space on the server, so I installed the Mac Connector software and created a 300GB backup file for Time Machine to use.

For the last few steps I used Robocopy again to copy the entire Videos share from the older server to the new, and made sure all of our data was moved off the old server. I did the software installations and configurations needed to get Metabrowser running on the new server, and had to reconfigure Mediabrowser on my HTPC to find the new storage locations but that only took a few minutes.

After a final check of the old server, I powered it off and swapped places on my network shelf with the new primary Home Server. The new EX495 server is working very well, and it’s definitely higher performance than the EX475 it replaced. I’ll keep the EX475 set aside for a while to make sure I didn’t miss anything from it, and to be able to test and troubleshoot with. I also have to admit to some sentimental attachment to this server after helping to build it and having used it for two years.

If you find this guide useful and perform a Home Server migration of your own using either this or the Server Recovery method, let us know how it works out for you!

Tagged as: Backup, EX470, EX475, EX490, EX495, Guides, MediaSmart Server, Storage, Windows Home Server