Interesting new product at CES – HP MediaSmart Home Server and Windows Home Server

I only had a few hours to walk the show floor at CES. Knowing that most technology items are in South Hall, I focused on selected heavy hitters. Of all the new products that I saw, the most compelling was the HP MediaSmart Home Server, which runs the new Windows Home Server software. It has almost everything that I’d want in a home server:

• Up to eight hard drives, four internal (mounted on sleds) sleds plus up to four USB-attached, providing up to 8GB with the new Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 HDD.
• Automatic scheduled backup of all PCs on the network (a client app will wake up a PC from hibernation for backup)
• Backs up entire HDD, not just the critical files, allowing a bare metal restore
• De-duplication of files, i.e., it will only keep one copy of identical files that are stored on multiple PCs.
• When more than one HDD is mounted, “important” files specified by the user will be saved on multiple HDDs to protect against HDD failure.
• Web server for remote access to content
• DLNA media server
• Monitoring of status of your PCs in terms of virus protection, patches, etc.

Now if it is possible to back up all this content remotely with Mozy or Carbonite, it would be about perfect. I want one. Badly.

Success with Mozy!

In my previous post, I mentioned my frustrations with Microsoft Networking. Somehow, I just can’t seem to find other computers on my network and share folders effectively. Maybe it’s my Zone Alarm firewall, maybe it’s just Windoze. In any case, I found a workaround. Not shown in my December 2005 post is a Ximeta Netdisk which is a network disk drive (as opposed to a NAS device which is more like a file server). Many people pan this device, complaining about how you need to load a special driver to access it. Well, it is true, it is a bit of a pain to install, but in this case, it gives me an easy way to reliably put files on a network drive that can be backed up using the low power Via computer that I described previously. The latest driver allows simultaneous read/write access from multiple PCs, which wasn’t possible on earlier driver versions. You do now, however, have to unmount the drive before hibernating, which is a real pain.

The trick is in the Ximeta driver. To the PC, it makes the network-attached Ximeta drive look like a direct-attached SCSI drive! Thus, Mozy sees it as a local drive and is more than happy to back up any files on the drive. As we speak, the Via is backing up a few folders on the Ximeta drive to a free account (2GB limit) on Mozy.

Backing up data – or lose it!

I work in the hard disk drive (HDD) industry, so I know that it’s a fact of life that hard drives fail. No matter how well engineered the drives may be, sometimes s*&% happens. Whether it’s a drive crash, a OS malfunction, physical shock, accident, abuse, or vandalism, one day you may lose your data. I was never much one for backing up to external drives; unless it’s automatic, it’ll never happen. That’s why I bought a Mirra server to back up the data on all the PCs on my home network. As great as the Mirra is, it has it’s limitations:

1. It has a single disk drive, and multiple single points of failure.
2. There is no way that I know of to back up the HDD in the Mirra.
3. The Mirra resides in your home, so if disaster strikes your home, you lose your systems and the backups.

Big business addresses these issues with storage systems with no single point of failure, off-site backups, remote mirroring, etc. But what’s a home user to do?

You could get something like a Buffalo Linkstation and set it up remotely at a friend’s house and back-up via FTP your critical data via broadband. Problem is you tie up both broadband connections, yours and your friend’s.

I’m intrigued by the online backup services like Mozy and Carbonite that provide unlimited backup storage for basically $5 per month or $50 per year. Since I like to use networked storage to consolidate my files on my network, one limitation of these services is that you can only back up local drives, not external drives nor mapped network-attached storage drives. So, you need to leave the PC that you want backed up on all the time. The power draw of a modern PC, while lower with the new advances in dual core processors, still is considerable and can exceed the cost of the backup service itself. And if you have multiple PCs like me, you need multiple accounts and multiple $5/month payments.

As a possible workaround, I’ve been playing with the idea of a dedicated backup box. Long ago I bought a low power Via Nehemiah processor (1.3GHz) on a Syntax S635MP motherboard for $5 after rebate that can almost run air-cooled. I slapped it in an Antec case and am using the integrated graphics. So, computationally it’s a dog, but with a 200GB HDD in it, it’s a fairly low power PC that runs Windows XP reasonably well. If I could just get Windows networking to work reliably, I could use something like NTI Shadow to backup key files continously from all my PCs to a shared folder on the Via system and have that continuously backed up remotely via Mozy or Carbonite for a single $5/month fee. Seems like cheap insurance to me.

Any thoughts or comments?