Seeing as I currently only use my WHS v1 for holding my media collection, and not much else,
I'm thinking that as Drive Bender, or a similar product, is supported on Windows 7, why not use
Windows 7 instead of WHS 2011.

So, I purchased a cheap HP Proliant Microserver (£136 with a £100 cash-back from HP) to install WHS 2011, but seeing as I can't lay my hands on
a (legal) copy of the WHS 2011 software yet, I thought I'd give it a go.

Installing W7 was a breeze - installed in 18 minutes.

I have removed 1 drives from my HP X510 and purchased a new one, and installed them into the Microserver.

All seems to be working fine with Drive Bender, so may stay with this set up until WHS 2011 is freely available.

Not that concerned about backups, as I run nightly ROBOCOPY jobs to move the data I need securing.

Well, by your description, looks like you never needed a WHS anyway. So, congrats

Probably was a bit over the top, but I DE was a necessity, and streaming a must.

Was gonna use it for a centralised mail server, but since found it not easy to do.

Still in two minds about WHS 2011 or W7, so time will tell.

Yeah...DE was nice...but it had its problems...trust me!


Why a DIY centralized mail server? Just use Google Apps...free for up to 50 users, and it's Gmail...over 7GB of space per user...fast as heck...labels...filters...good spam protection..anti-virus...give it a go, you'll like it.1

Nah, don't like 3rd-party mail servers, I like to use my own.

Wanted to use WHS and a mail add-in to have centralised mail server similar to Exchange, but it's not possible.

I know this is an old post, but was curious to your experience using Win 7.

I have several copies of Win 7 readily available but would have to buy WHS 2011. My WHSv1 Mediasmart just died, so was in the process of upgrading the box and trying to decide what to install.

The thoughts of Win 7, being able to setup media center extenders, install itunes without hacking, and setting up my printer with all features enabled and shared just seem like a win. Subsonic, Plex all the good stuff should just work on it.

I would probably have to set it up to autologin on boot, but no worries there.

Would probably still want it to be headless for the most part.

Have you found any deficiencies? I would buy DriveBender and do pools and just create users to folders much like WHS does already. Little more work on my part, but thats easy work.

Going to go try and see if microsoft lists a good vs page somewhere between the two. I think they might be limited by the number of simultaneous connections?

If you have Win 7 and don't need the client backup that WHS 2011 provides, then stick with Win 7. Otherwise WHS 2011 can be had for $45 all the time - which is cheaper than a Windows 7 license.

My plan on that was just do one of the free imaging software you can find laying around these days, and just have it store on a file on the box. Since the death of of my WHS, I know of no way short of getting another WHSv1 to bring back all the backups I had... which really stinks, because there were a few computers on there that are non existant now that I had been meaning to dig through.

The other way as long as the drives are good, I could still get to the backups..

also had some issues a time or two doing the over the network bare metal restore on whsv1, so copying the backup file to an external hard drive and then just doing it that way just seems the better route to me.

I can state that WHS 2011 is much better in this regard. It custom makes bootable flash drives for the recovery process. To me the two biggest pro's of the WHS backup is it has data de-dupe - if you have two Windows 7 machines, only one copy of Windows 7 is stored. Likewise for other files. The more computers you have, the greater the savings and advantage this is. And the biggest plus for me with the WHS backup is it's completely automatic. I don't have to think about it. If I have to manually do it, the chances of me actually continuing to do it are quite slim. Human nature, really....

If you have the discipline and storage to make complete image backups on a routine basis, my hats off to you! Your more organized than I

My main server is based on Win7 and I love it. I have ROBOCOPY running every night to back up what I need. The only downside I can see is that you dont have the remote site but I dont really needed because I use logmein.

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Freedom is not only to do what you love, but to love what you do.

Robocopy can't provide the version history or data de-duplication that the WHS workstation backup does. You may be able to automate via scripting, but it will never be as automatic or reliable as that which is provided by the WHS workstation backup.

That may not be important to you, but I find these features extremely useful and advantageous.

Top it off with the $45 license for WHS and most will find WHS an incredible and grossly underrated value.

It was running at 29.99 on TigerDirect this week actually.

I would probably use something like this http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm although no data deduplication, still gives you incremental backups.

I was just thinking about putting WHS on a virtual inside my windows 7, could of done it the other way too, just for the client backup actually.