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PostPosted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 2:30 pm 
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Hello all,

I’m a new Windows Home Server user, and I’m totally flummoxed. I really could use some help from the collective brain trust here. I’ve build and run a number of machines, but never a home server, so please be gentle.

The server is a roll-your-own that I put together from a P55 board with an i3-540, 4GB of Ram, and an old Maxtor 300GB SATA Drive. I then populated it with 4 1TB WD Caviar Greens. I am planning to add some 2TB Greens later, probably up to a max of 10-12 drives. Hey, I’ve got a lot of stuff to back up :-)

In my simple naiveté, I was planning implementing a simple backup scheme: have each client (just two for the moment, more to follow) back up Docs, Videos, and Pics to a separate HDD, then duplicating that to a second HDD. So, Client #1 backs up to Green#1, which is mirror by Green #2, and Client #2 backs up to Green #3, duplicated to Green #4.

Here come the problem – it seems that I can only have ONE client backup folder! And it can only be on ONE disk! I can’t assign different clients to back up to different drives?

Is what I aimed for possible? Is there a workaround?

More puzzling to me, since the client backup folder can only be on one disk, and DE no longer exists, why would one put multiple drives in a server? How does WHS 2011 use multiple HDDs, if every client has to back up to the same single one?

I’m sure in my newb-ness, I’m missing something crucial, but I have no idea what. Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated!

-Tuthmose


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 3:59 pm 
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It is true that the "Client Computer Backups" folder in the WHS 2011 default state cannot span multiple drives. Part of the loss of DE in v2 WHS.

But there are some alternative DE software under development. Stablebit DrivePool is one... There are others. I've not looked at any of them because the loss of DE is not an issue for me.

In addition, you could use Windows diskmgmt.msc (Disk Managment console) to combine your drives into a dynamic drive (basically span the drives). To do so, you'll have to move your data elsewhere, then setup the new spanned volume, then move the data back. The issue there is that if you lose one drive to hardware failure, you'll lose the whole (multi-drive) volume. To combat that, there are various flavors of RAID you can setup through the same tool which give you some redundancy and fallbacks against hardware failure. You will want to read about RAID a bit before you do that so you know what you're getting into.

As far as what use are multiple drives... Well... for most people, we want to store more than just backups on our servers. For example, I have about 3TB of ripped movies, 200GB of ripped music, some podcasts, videos from youtube, and multiple GB of photos, some amount of software downloads, etc. I also use the server to run always on uTorrent. So it is a lot more than backup (for me only 160GB between 6 PCs).


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Tuthmose
PostPosted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 4:42 pm 
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Arrgh. Seriously. Arrgh.

Thank you, RehabMan, for your help and clarification. I do understand about the other uses of multiple drives, but I'm kind of stunned that they can't be taken advantage of for client backups. I too have TB of ripped films (6TB+, at last count), but they live on my home theater. I didn't really want to migrate my stuff to my server, so much as use it for a backup FOR that stuff. But perhaps that won't be . . .

I'm very familiar with RAID, having RAIDED several of my earlier PCs. I didn't RAID the Server for the same reason I haven't done so to my current gaming rig - I used Western Digital drives. I love 'em for speed and reliability, but they're deliberately crippled to make them useless for RAID, and I'm sure not paying a 50% premium to buy their "RAID-certified" versions, which basically just have a time-limited-error-recovery tweak. (In fact, the storage plan I mentioned above is really just a manual version of RAID1 to work around this issue). So I guess that's not going to be my answer.

I'm interested in the dynamic drive solution, though. Would it be possible to divide my storage drives (i.e. not including the OS disk) into two identically-sized dynamic drives, and then use one to mirror the other? Basically a ghetto-version of RAID1 in some sense? That might solve my issue, if indeed it can be done. Any enlightenment on this issue would be appreciated.

Thanks,
-Tuthmose


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:56 pm 
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Tuthmose wrote:
Arrgh. Seriously. Arrgh.

I'm interested in the dynamic drive solution, though. Would it be possible to divide my storage drives (i.e. not including the OS disk) into two identically-sized dynamic drives, and then use one to mirror the other? Basically a ghetto-version of RAID1 in some sense? That might solve my issue, if indeed it can be done. Any enlightenment on this issue would be appreciated.

Thanks,
-Tuthmose


I think you could. You are just talking about creating two dynamic (RAID1) volumes from your 4 drives. I think the RAID1 is called simply "mirror" as far as Windows is concerned. I've never used any of that stuff, preferring to do backups exclusively, but it is there.


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