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Windows Home Server Corrupts Files
crustymonkey points out a ComputerWorld article which says that "Microsoft Corp. has warned Windows Home Server users not to edit files stored on their backup systems with several of its programs, including Vista Photo Gallery and Office's OneNote and Outlook, as well as files generated by popular finance software such as Quicken and QuickBooks."
Crustymonkey asks Don't back up your files to Windows Home Server, as recommended by Microsoft themselves? I'm not exactly sure what the point is in having a home server if you can't back up files on it."
"I'm not exactly what the point is in having a home server if you can't back up files on it."
Profit
What happened to the Best Free Games Story?
Don't tell me everyone is asking that question.....just because it's a server doesn't mean you don't have to back that up as well.
WTF? Over?
They can't copy files to anywhere...
not to be the grammar natzi.. but damn reading that summary hurt my head.
.... If there's a user friendly alternative to Windows server for Joe Enduser? I run a Debian box with Samba on a computer that does hardware RAID 1 for my file sharing needs (I also have an SCP turned on so I can shove files onto it from outside my network too). But that's not something that I can suggest to my friends and family. So what can I suggest to them that is as "user friendly" as Windows Server?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Microsoft Home Server Converts Files to a Secure Format for Your Security.
Microsoft will gladly sell you a one use un-convert license when you need to see the data.
The blurb says that it corrupts files on the backup when you try to edit them...
Isn't part of the point of a backup that you DON'T edit the backup media?
I can look at this two ways... MS didn't test this enough because it didn't occur to them someone might do something so ridiculous...
OR...
Not only did MS create the misfeature that is editing backups, but they screwed it up too...
Am I still feeling charitable from the holiays? Hmm...
MS also don't recommend you put your Outlook Personal Folders on a server (or 'network drive') either, which in this case could be an "Enterprise" server...
Yes really: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297019
You wouldn't edit a file you backed up to tape, would you? Or CD?
You should restore a backed-up file before editing it.
So I read TFA thinking, so there's a glitch when windows has virus X on wednesdays only, and only in regions that have the chinese language pack, and only on systems with 64-bit version installed with a sound blaster driver installed.
But for the first time ever, slashdot's title isn't sensationalist. Microsoft simply states, yeah, for no apparent reason, files are getting corrupt using our operating system.
Jeebus F'n H Chroist! You had one job to do, and you screwed it up royally.
It's one thing when some obscure feature doesn't work correctly. It's another thing when a fundamental operation of your software hasn't worked for A YEAR since it came out.
IT'S AN OPERATING SYSTEM. Your job is to interface the hardware with the user and software.
*sigh* Bring on the "my linux-distro of choice doesn't do that, that makes me right all along" comments.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Everyone knows you have to wait until at least version 3.1 to get anything useful out of Microsoft.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
It's to show another failure at Microsoft in their core markets, while they pursue TV, Magazines, Video Games, etc.
Put your trust in Microsoft, because they're gonna kill off every other competitor anywayA feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I would suggest a good DVD writer. There is lots of room, you can schedule backups, and all the people need to do is to remember to put in a new DVD every week or on whatever schedule you/they set up.
As to Microsoft screwing up yet again, it's just funny. Very funny.
Think Allen has rubber chairs to throw around now?
Why would anyone edit the backed up files anyway, sorta defeats the purpose if they are stored copies of backed up files from the clients. Just edit the files on the client and let them backup again. No need to store data on a share... /sarcasm
Obligatory link to KB article
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
...from Debian, SuSE, Red Hat. Just insert one of their DVDs and select "Install".
The link from the summary leads to... damn it's so bad I can hardly say it. Worse than tubgirl and goatse combined.
As the blank screen fails to load, an ad pops up. Then a "greeting page" appears on the blank page ("greetings from our advertisers")
Then I notice the "click here to ignore this greetings page and enter ComputerWorld, the world's worst IT magazine".
Of course I quickly hit the "back" button so I wouldn't be assaulted with a million ads and a paragreph of content-free lead-in text before "click here for next page".
Honestly, guys, can't you find a better link? Oh shit, the only two that Google News shows is ComputerWorld and PC World.
Why is it that the very WORST sites on the internet are IT sites? It's embarrassing! And people wonder why, if you RTFM, "ewe muss bee knew hear". We KNOW BETTER! We know what is ready to assault us if we dare click a link to an IT site!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When I submitted this story last week, I mentioned that it was likely due to the way it handles ADS (NTFS' Alternate Data Streams) on shared folders. Fortunately, there are only so many programs that actually use those.
That said, yeah, I wouldn't use Windows for a server, either. It's just not reliable enough, given that you can do better for free.
According to the MS knowledge base entry:
;-)
"Make sure that you have a backup copy of any important program files before you store these files on a system that is running Windows Home Server."
In other words, use something else to backup the files first if you intend to backup them with Windows Home Server
Why didn't they upgrade to the latest version of Samba ?
Similar setup here, too.
In fact, running a Linux + Samba + SSH/SFTP/SCP + RAID ( + Optionally NFS ) seems the best solution available.
You can't suggest them to install and configure Debian all by themselves.
BUT
There are virtually hundred of "network enclosure" : Small empty external cases, with a 1Gbps ethernet and a small ARM chip running Linux+Samba+Apache, almost ready to use, you only need to buy disks and mount them in (several computer part shop even propose you to sell a pre-assembled such solution).
Linksys, D-Link and Netgear are a few of the constructor whose name jump to my mind right now, but there are virtually hundreds of them.
The best part is :
- These box have Linux pre-installed on their flash memory. So no difficult configuration is required for the average users. Maybe just help them to configure secure access and configure the router if they also want to have access to the files from outside home. The computer part shop often can do the hard-drive mounting and deliver a ready-to-use product.
- Almost any of those box runs Linux, so their firmware is modifiable and you can find several guides explaining how to run external software or even installing additional software into the firmware. MLDonkey is such an open source eD2K / Bittorrent / etc. client which is also precompiled for embed Linux.
Not only the enclosure is useful for average user, it may be useful for lazy power-users who don't want to assemble their own server or prefer silent and energy efficient servers.
- A lot of those boxes have USB2 "Host" connectors, so you can connect additional HDD to the server. But as it is Linux, a lot of different and interesting usage can be found be power users like plugins webcams, or use the box as a print server in addition to a file server.
So yes, you can't easily tell your friends to *install* Debian all by themselves, but you can get them to buy an enclosure with Linux pre-installed. (And if they upgrade their box to a newer one, you can recycle the old one into some fun project thanks to Linux' openness and available USB2 connectors).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Microsoft says: "When you use certain programs to edit files on a home computer that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server."
1 - If there is a Home Server somewhere on my network that I save files to, does that make MY computer "a home computer that uses WHS"?
2- Does "edit files on a home computer" mean opening a file that is ON my PC, or merely opening a file WITH my PC?
3 - Is WHS a backup system, or a file server? If it is a file server, then I have an expectation that I can edit files that it serves me.
The summary, indeed the entire article, leaves many unanswered questions.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons MS decided to acquiesce in the samba matter :) they need help fixing something they broke so badly they don't know what to do... perhaps it feels as if chairs had wings aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhahahhah ahhahahaha.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
There's a difference between "backing up" and editting files on the server. So when one opines "I'm not exactly what the point is in having a home server if you can't back up files on it."... it shows they don't understand that difference.
Now an actual valid complaint would be what good is having a file server if you can't STORE files on it... but that's a world of difference between simply backing those files up.
I have a feeling this problem will be fixed in less time than it takes Apple to shut down a blogger.
In this capacity, the problem would be with using WHS as a file server. I must say this is nail #2 in the grave of my disappointment with WHS. My first problem with it is that there is a bug in performance - reads are fine, but writing data to a WHS share is unacceptably slow. Some will claim it's Vista autotuning, or differential copy, or something else but it's demonstrably just piss-poor performance on WHS.
Overall the product is a good idea, it's just poorly implemented at present. If they fix this new bug and fix the performance issues, I'd actually be pretty happy with it.
"The user has to get the openbsd server package now, but there's nothing easier than dragging and dropping files with Konqueror."
Definitely. Open up 2 copies of Konq. On one, have your local filesystem. On the other "fish://ip.to.remote.system". Drag your files between the 2 systems as required.
They don't have linux installed on their local machine? Give them a bootable cd/dvd/thumbdrive/whatever.
Kevin Smith on Prince
IMHE (In My Humble Experience), file locks are glitchy and don't really work right on network storage (please please provide counter-examples if you have them). If one writes an application that makes heavy use from write-only locks, shared-read locks, and other file system locks provided by Windows, yeah, I can see some corruption possibly happening when the network store refuses to honor those requests. Also NTFS-specific file system conveniences (sparce-file options, alternative data streams, etc) generally get hung out to dry across a network.
I doubt those bugs are so much with Home Server as it is with those specific applications.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Twitter's sock puppet Erris has negative karma.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Having come from a DECNet background, when I first encountered PC networking I was completely flummoxed by the situation.
MS-DOS and Windows users seem to take it for granted that a file that is across the network is accessed via different APIs, different user interfaces, and has generally different properties from files that are stored locally. In the MS-DOS days they were always mumbling about The Redirector. Why does a file need to be REdirected across the network? Why isn't it just directed, the way it would be directed to a disk volume or a floppy or what have you?
It isn't so long ago that most Windows programs couldn't even reference cross-network files in a straightforward way in a file open dialog. You first had to assign a "drive letter" and "map a network drive." (And, of course, all references to that file would break if you ever assigned the remote directory to a different drive letter).
And when they finally got around to fixing it in the OS, it only fixed it for new programs that were written to some new API. Existing programs, even things like Visual C++ utilities, continued to go through the mapping tapdance, because apparently the existing OS file dialog routines weren't updated to do things the new way.
The assumption that files across the network are totally differents sorts of thing from local files appeared to be so ingrained in the Windows culture that Windows people don't even understand why it is a criticism of Windows to mention this. They think it has to be that way, because, well, they're across the network. As if there were some physical property of 100-base-T cables that made them intrinsically different from SATA cables.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This is too perfect an opportunity!!!
C SIG
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I've seen this before in AD groups. Windows will do a 'delayed write' of a file, then let you know later on if the write failed. Great if you're copying files up, terrible if you're saving a document while quitting the application and you get told 30 seconds later that your data was lost.
Example: http://cdslash.net/temp/images/datalost.png
Quite frustrating. I've yet to lose serious amounts of data so far, but I'm sure it'll happen.
You're not exactly what what?
(http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/27/038227)
MS is on a roll.
It boggles the mind how such basic OS functionality can be broken.
For me it was Visual Studio files, the scenario is I have a solution in a directory on the Home Server that I open in VS and start to edit. I save very often, as a force of habit, and randomly VS would say that the solution file or the project file was invalid. I would open it in a text editor and it's garbled, should be plain text. The work around I use is to do all editing on my local drive and copy the contents to the Home Server when done. I have not had any issue with file corruption since, also I have not had data corruption issues with programs that edit my pictures or music files directly on the Home Server. It has something to do with the way they implemented the drive extender. Bittorrent downloads require the same type of workaround, download somewhere and then copy to Home Server, but you can seed from the Home Server with no issues. It will be nice to have a fix.
My personal experience: Vista corrupts files unless you only use Vista. I'm not surprised now to hear more Vista-related corruption. Maybe Microsoft should add to their sales pitch and say Vista is safer, even against the RIAA because it corrupts your files when they try to investigate you. Now with more backup corruption!
It's not only a file server, but also a mighty file shredding machine.
the point is that you cannot store these types of files on the network. if you store them locally and then back them up using windows home server, they will work fine. the text/title of both the article and the slashdot posting are misleading and leading to a large amount of FUD around here... =P
Which do well to explain the reason why, when a $1000 PC is faster than a $1,000,000 mainframe, that businesses still buy the mainframe. And then they stock the washrooms with single-ply toilet paper to cut costs.
Microsoft has made a lot of noise about being "Enterprise class" software, and having "Reliable" servers, but when things like this happen, it just goes to show that Microsoft won't ever be able to touch big iron:
The next time I hear anyone use the term "enterprise class" and Microsoft in the same sentence, I'm simply going to refer them to this bug. Totally unacceptable - even for a gaming OS.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I mean really, after the first 6143569056076952107294386875907695350 times maybe it was worthy of a chuckle, but to keep on modding up this joke suggests some form of psychosis.
Wait, I'll put this in a way that you mods can understand:
1. go to slashdot
2. find a story
3. find a comment on that story
4. post a tired, old, lame-ass joke for the 9 billionth time
5. ???????
6. GET MODDED UP!
Ok, I followed the silly meme, where's my +5 Funny?
Lest the Redmond PR flacks come up out of the muck to scream at me.
Quote from Microsoft's support article: "When you use certain programs to edit files on a home computer that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server."
A large amount of Microsoft's profit, in my opinion, comes from selling unfinished software, and then getting money for "upgrades". Microsoft won't get money for the fix to this problem, but I think you will agree that Microsoft is the largest supplier of unfinished software, and making the whole world a beta tester is cheaper than selling a finished product.
Therefore, MOD PARENT UP.
I notice that people are inventing nonsense about this; the problem appears not to have anything to do with editing backups.
It only takes 131+ years to copy 168 MB of pictures, what are you complaining about?
"Except in reality you are twice as likely to shoot a friend or family member than defend your home with your home defense gun."
Not really. Statistically, there are twice as many shootings of friends and family members as actual intruders. Now, that includes accidental as well as intentional shootings, so how one can apply "statistical likelyhood" to voluntary acts is beyond me, but that's the way you are using it - somehow, the presence of a gun in the house makes me more likely to be violent toward my family. Like it's Satan and the apple.
But a bigger point is that one can "defend your home with your home defense gun" WITHOUT shooting the intruder. The statistics you use don't include incidents where firearms are shown, pointed, fired into the air (stupid, BTW)or otherwise used without actually firing on the assailant. So if some drunk breaks into my house and I hold him at gunpoint while the police show up (remember, when seconds count the police are just minutes away), that doesn't show up in your statistics but it is defending my home with a gun.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Sound and thermal protection around the racks. leave 2-feet on each side, plus room to fit in at least 2 more racks. Put in a fire-suppression system. Put your desk as far from this wall as possible.
Apple Guy: Hey, PC. Whatcha doing?
PC Guy: Backing up my files.
AG: Wow. That's a lot of stuff - sure you can handle it all?
PC: Oh, sure. I'm using Vista Home Server. It allows me to back up my files by placing them securely in here.
AG: Whoa! What's the noise!?
PC: It's my backup appliance!
AG: Dude! That's a shredder!
PC: What!? Can't hear you!
AG:
The problem occurs when you save to a shared folder. That's separate from the backup functionality.
try the following commandline, for a daily backup routine to any drive that you've got mapped:
/FSKCHEVYRD
xcopy source:/path/to/files/*.* destination:/path/to/files/*.*
I find it extremely useful to do a backup of just the files that are newer than destination.
oh, you want it to output to a log file? easy... add "> my:/logfile.txt" to the end of the line.
you can use windows scheduler to run this command every night/morning/whenever you're not awake and at your workstation.
oh yeah, this is microsoft only, but you linux fanbois out there know how to use cron and cp, right?
s/PC/Windows/
Wow, you only used "PC" once in that whole thing.
Are you lost too? I was trying to read an article about black holes and I have no idea how I came here. Anyway here it goes.
FRIST PSOT!!
Ok, 168 MB is 168*1024*1024 = 176,160,768 bytes.
A Commodore 64's floppy disk, the 1541 runs at 300 baud. So that's 176160768/300 = 587203 seconds for an equivalent copy. That's 9786 minutes, or 163.1 hours. That's 6.796 days.
The same copy will take Vista 131 years. That's 47815 days.
That means that a Commodore 64 w. 1541 drive is roughly 47815/6.796 = 7036 times faster than Windows Vista.
Now, for a human number. An average typist gets about 50-70 wpm according to wiki. So we'll call the average 60wpm. Seems reasonable. That's 60*5 = 300 characters per minute. Since a C64 moves data at 300 characters per second, we can say that a human typist is 60 times slower than the Commodore 64. That means that a human typist is 7036/60 = 117 times faster than a Vista file copy.
Impressive!
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
... and an obvious troll at that. The MS says "don't edit", the poster pretends that it said "don't backup". Very simple. The original poster gets a mandatory IQ check, packs his stuff and goes to the mental insitution, where he belongs, followed by his Slashdot moderator buddies, who put this troll on the front page.
Guys, get a grip! This is nothing new - the ReadMe.txt file for WHS says the same thing: Don't *store* frequently modified critical files such as Outlook (.ost) files on the server. Keep them local, and let WHS back them up like any other file. This excellent advice applies to all operating systems and networks: any file that is frequently updated and may get corrupted if a write is interrupted should be stored locally. Network connections can go down; packets can get lost; etc. etc. Sure, in an ideal world writes are atomic and files are never left in a vulnerable state - but that's not as common as we would like.
I'd like the meet the numbskull who thinks it's a good idea to edit files saved on their backup systems. I'm not defending Microsoft here, anything which can corrupt backups is inexcusable, but it's no less excusable to be using a backup system for anything but maintaining a laptop.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
WTF is Minicity? I haven't bothered to follow the links 'cause I'm not in the habit of clicking on things I don't recognize.... Any ideas on why there's so much spam about it lately?
Also, solution: have a captcha for AC posts.
maybe it's a write-through cache issue? If the "server" is designed specifically for backups and file storage and not active read / write, maybe that's the problem. Although, I read above that one person applied the fix and it works. Sounds like it was causing problems but has been fixed.
Don't get me wrong, I use Linux for all my file server needs, too!
The overly open-ended "works fine" rebuttal is actually only ever used when something doesn't work *well* (because otherwise, given the choice, one would just say "it works WELL" and not the weak "it works fine"). When you analyse what this is, you see it's actually an attempt at a false dichotomy: It suggests that the suitability of something to a task is a binary "true/false", i.e. either something is suitable ("fine") or it isn't, then falsely suggests that all things "fine" are thusly equivalent. A few simple examples demonstrate the weakness of this argument: My beat-up old car "works fine" - does that make it just as good as a Porsche? My old toilet that always leaks unless you jiggle the flusher handle in just the right way also "works fine" - does that make it just as good as a fancy new toilet that doesn't leak? A cardboard box "works fine" as a coffee table in my lounge. Etc. etc.
Let's face it, many of the Microsoft "networking" models are poor compared to their (far older) UNIX equivalents, even though the latter may be imperfect. Just as one example, when Microsoft is advertising the concept of "access your e-mail from anywhere in the world" as if it's a brand new thing in 2007, something is very wrong indeed. The UNIX world should market their solutions better - most people don't know any better.
"... as long as you don't edit the file on the server, you're ok."
Maybe, but that's not what it says. Is even the Microsoft web page a buggy beta?: Microsoft Support article: "When you use certain programs to edit files on a home computer that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server."
That quote says the bug appears only on a home computer that "uses" Windows Home Server. Does that mean the home computer uses Windows Home Server as a server, or the home computer operating system is Windows Home Server?
Once again, Microsoft has sold sloppy, unfinished software, supported with sloppy and unfinished support pages.
Further, does that sentence mean that, if it is an office computer, there is no problem? The whole purpose of using the word "Home" is apparently to try to intimidate less-technically-minded managers from using the software in a small business office.
Do evil if it will make more money?
You can backup files to the system PERFECTLY FINE. It's just that once they are backed up, there is some problem editing the files on the server. While that's obviously a problem, why are people needing to edit their backups? I thought the point of a backup was just to be a copy of whatever is on your system. If you edit the file directly on your server you are leaving your PC with an older version - that doesn't make any sense.
Look here!! http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=348/
At the risk of trolling here, "I told you so".
:)
From the very fist moment I heard about this, I knew it would be a disaster.
The reason is pretty simple. Why use a Home Server edition when you could use WIN2K Advanced Server or Server 2003? A high end home, for example, would have the finances to afford it. WIN2K Advanced Server is a lot cheaper now.
Every time Microsoft makes a low-end product, or an entry level product, it turns out to be inferior and cause more problems then the money it saves. Windows XP Home vs. Windows XP Professional?
This is a persistent theme for this company. Anything with "Home" in the title is usually watered down to the point that is nearly unusable. They take all the "good stuff" and throw it into the higher end products.
It's like a car dealership selling a the "Home" edition of the car without tires
P.S - This is a complete disaster for them. Security risks and BSOD's are one thing. Home users are now going to be very concerned about keeping all of their media on it. I don't mean the vacation videos, pictures of their kids... but something even more serious... PORN. A deal breaker to be sure.
It is my understanding that it is files with Alternate Data Streams being stored on a shared folder on the server that may get corrpupted. It looks like the file storage is impacted, not the backup/restore functions.
I have not been able to find information on Alternate Data Streams in Samba.
-AC
No one on /. wants to hear that...you'll spoil a perfectly good bashing!
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
You are editing a file that is saved directly to a shared folder on WHS, which WHS accepts and gives the A-OK signal to your software, then later has a problem writing the file, and tells you about it, with no chance of recovering the file at that time. Since this can happen after you have exited your software, you have no way of recovering the file.
The problem is not:
The third one is the trickiest. See, if you go to the current WHS Discover site (click Help and How-To's) you will see that the big thing is Remote Access, Media Sharing, and Computer Backup. This would lead people to believe that any other use, is not what it was meant for, and when something goes wrong, you should have known better.
But, one only needs to look back at previous pages for WHS to see that Sharing was a central feature. Yes, full sharing, not just Media Sharing. Even the Overview of that page focuses on sharing first, and backup (protection) was third. The first overview item was Sharing, and that is simply what this problem is about, shared folders. Either for your own use as a networked server, or to share with other users.
Now, if you go to Eric Bott's blog, you will see the explanation that the largest factor is "a home server is under extreme load." Well, I'm sorry, but if the touted role, even at the beginning and not right now, was acting as a share folder to save your stuff to, then by damn it better do that. If the server gets loaded down, it should not pretend it got the file and tell you later that it didn't, it should just either not respond (and your software would have to let you know it couldn't do it) or it should give an error response (your software's problem now).
Honestly, this product was marketed as a home server for storing and sharing your files, with acting as a backup server making 3rd on the list of features. Now, they want to change that and say that it is for backup first, file sharing from special locations and under special conditions, and not really for file storage.
Cause you can't get a tan from an amber monitor. If you do, there is something horribly wrong.
It seems these days, and not just with Microsoft, products are screwing up a lot more of the "basics". The kind of bugs that make you not even bother trying to find the source of a problem in higher level software, because you've stopped trusting that the foundation has been properly tested!
I'm not sure why...maybe testing these basics is boring, maybe money is never put into it, or maybe companies are trying to see how sloppy they can be with its beta te...uh I mean customers, without losing revenue.
But professionally speaking, this stuff is scary. It hints at major regression testing holes in software processes we can't see, that society depends on crucially. Yes, software is infinitely complex, yada yada, but at the end of the day you *can* make at least these kinds of problems go away, and a multi-billion-dollar corporation sure as hell can be expected to minimize them. Maybe society needs to demand more from its software providers, and not just sit still when "basic" assumptions about software reliability aren't met.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
I hope this seriously impacts their sales and image on the market as it seems this is the only way they will ever learn anything. If everyone simply shrugs and waits for an MS patch to be released it will be par for the course like with all their other products - "please pay to beta test our code, we'll get it right one day".
Thankfully I have my QNAP TS-201 NAS (1TB x 2 RAID1) to tied me over. The wife's Time machine backups work flawlessly to it.
Windows Home Server is little more than a web control panel on top of the XP kernel, yet they managed to screw it up somehow ?! That's a new level of incompetence!
:)
How about you take that old XP machine you replaced last summer, add a bunch of big hard drives and set up conventional shared folders. That has been proven to work by millions of office and home networks worldwide, AND you can still do anything else on that machine, should you need to. I personally run Windows 2003, but that's because I'm fussy and I already had it. I'm sure XP or 2000 would work exactly the same.
If you don't have a spare XP machine, build a cheap one and use Linux. All you really need is the cheapest board, CPU and Ram you can find (integrated video), a good power supply and a few large SATA drives. You could go with a used PC, just make sure the power supply is in good shape - better yet, replace it outright. Get an oversized model from a half-decent brand like Antec, Seasonic or OCZ... something quiet with 3-4 times more power than you think you need (500-600w is the sweet spot). Linux + Samba + FTP =
Actually the only reason I didn't do Linux on my home server is because I had already ripped all my movies to an NTFS drive, and I didn't feel like juggling about 800gb of DVD images around my network, just to reformat a drive. Maybe I'll do that the next time I add more drives.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...and the exact same holds of cases when somebody who owns a gun did not get a chance to use it to defend their home. To get a really meaningful comparison, you need to tabulate, for every case that a home gets invaded while occupants are there, whether the household had any guns at the time, whether the occupants drew the gun in self-defense, and deaths and injuries of occupants.
The correct question to be asking is whether the number of injuries and deaths of occupants in home invasions varies at all depending on whether the households have firearms. If there isn't any significant correlation, then on average, owning a gun doesn't make you any less likely to die or be injured in such a situation, and makes you more likely to die or be injured in other, non-home invasion situations.
Careful what you say. You don't have a right to "kill." You have a right to stop somebody from inflicting immediate severe harm on yourself or another, with up to lethal force. Your goal must be to stop an immediate, severe threat, not to kill the perpetrator. Your right stops as soon as you've stopped the threat, and you don't have a right to decide whether the perpetrator survives afterwards; if he lives, he lives.
You've already ruined two Slashdot accounts. You would think it's time to pack it up and leave by now.
That's the question that has my mind boggled here.
I mean, yeah, one could imagine a backup system that would notice any attempted write to a backed-up file and "do the right thing" in every case, but I'm not familiar with any real implementations.
(subversion notwithstanding.)
(Hopefully, I'm stating the obvious, as usual, but I'm wondering how you automate forks.)
I mean, what is the purpose of the home file server?
Everyone wants magic "management" of their files. Microsoft sells a server that will handle some forms of incremental backup. Users try to edit the backup _directly_ and the system bombs.
Microsoft is selling the 20% solution as the 80% solution again. Or, more correctly, the 1% of functionality as the 100% solution. Yeah, they cover the most commonly requested cases, but the most commonly requested cases are not the most commonly needed. And as computer "professionals", there is a certain amount of fraud and negligence in their behavior, but because even the judges are unfamiliar with the technology, they expect to get away with it.
But, of course, someone tries an edit directly on the backup. What they probably want to do is a branch. It shouldn't even be allowed as an edit.
Think about this. The server would have to _automatically_ generate a virtual sandbox for the user. Specifics about the sandbox depend on the nature of the application doing the editing.
Even if that succeeds, the server then has to make a bunch of guesses about how to label the branch, and guide the user through some dialogs that would hopefully resolve the parts that guessing simply isn't going to work on. And you know who doing things like this with dialogs is. (Wizards? Yeah. Sure. Right. "Wizard" is an appropriate terminology here, considering that were dealing with things that don't exist in the real world. The train you, the user, where to decide you really didn't want to do that hard to manage thing, after all, and they call it a solution.)
They sell you a server. The server is for storing your files. They advertise backup.
They don't don't tell you what it actually does for you. If it's just for storage, why should the average user even buy it? If that's all, and if it's just for the "backup" that a lot of disk space gives you, a large (firewire or USB) external drive is sufficient, and can be extended with yet another.
They're selling fractional-solutions as solutions again. They say, "Our secretaries use their filing cabinets this way, and it works for us, so we'll sell you a computer system that (almost) imitates their methods." And they use terminology that happens to match up with technological terminology that means something sort-of related, but significantly harder to do with a computer and get right. And they imply that it's a general solution.
That is why M$ is evil. If they would be more circumspect with their sales, they would have just another OS that works for some purposes. But they couldn't make billions doing that, so they lie.
joudanzuki
Ed Bott has a little more on the problem:
"This is not an issue that affects every Windows Home Server installation, and the symptoms require several factors that are not mentioned in the KB article. The largest contributing factor is when a home server is under extreme load. If you're doing a large, highly demanding file copy operation in the background and you're using one of the listed applications to edit a file that's stored on a shared folder on the home server, and you save the edited file to the server, then you might see this bug."http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=348
Still a very serious issue though - for my sins, I'm a Windows Home Server MVP and we have a call with the WHS team on Jan 2nd, at which I'm expecting to find out more. I'll be posting any updates we can share at my blog: http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/
Cheers
Terry
-- Terry Walsh - MVP Windows Home Server http://www.wegotserved.co.uk
I've only been using is a short while, but I was delighted to find that the file manager in Ubuntu lets me mount CIFS/SMB (windows), NFS, SFTP, FTP (and probably a few others) as folders. This beside Windows which only allows CIFS/SMB.
Why open 2 copies? Just use a split view.
Most Linux based solution (either do-it yourself, or the distribution like "open filer" mentioned earlier in this thread) work using LVM2 as a way to manage ll those disks.
LVM has a nice feature called snapshoting, where, at one point of time you can fork the data into two version a read-only backup that corresponds to the state of the disk at that precise point of time, and the usual read-write partition that you continue to work with.
The systems relies on "copy-on-write" technique (it only duplicates the actual data when it is about to change. Partition block that didn't change between versions are stored only once).
You can use it to backup an active partition while it is used (you write your taping using the read-only snapshot as a source), or you can use it to keep a backup of your file at a precise time if you have enough free space on your discs (depends on how much the data is changed, if only a couple of files are changed over time, thank to "copy-on-write" only a little space will be used to store the difference).
Then either you mount the two partition on two different points and export them with Samba/DAV/FTP/whatever, or directly make the partitions available using iSCSI.
The user can freely modify files on the "active" partition, the snapshot will still hold a backup from when the snapshot was made.
I think it's available on distributions similar to Open File, and on the more expensive ready-to-use file servers like those small 1U servers, but I'm not sure about the small cheap enclosures-with-ARM/Linux-and-ethernet. (I think most of them doesn't use LVM but directly writes on the hard disks - maybe I'm wrong and LVM support is also appearing in cheaper boxes too)
The same kind of capabilities is also provided by ZFS on Solaris (except that you use a single solution for everything instead of having separate RAID + LVM + Ext3/ReiserFS/JFS )
Additionaly, as you said, version control systems (subversion, GIT, etc.) are a completely different approach which might be useful in other circumstances too.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Why open 2 copies? Just use a split view."
Dual 19" monitors, different directory hierarchies on the local and remote machines, etc.
Kevin Smith on Prince
The cake is a lie.
That was about the couple of cool stuff you, as a geek, could do, once your friends buy a bigger enclosure (move from an ATA133 to a SATA one, for exemple, or from a 100Mbps to a 1Gbps one) and you inherit the older one.
:
The enclosure themselves are ready to use : buy it, throw some drives inside (or have the computer parts shop do it), plug it into your network
- its already usable.
log into the built-in web server, and clic a few options around
- its secured and configured to your personnal taste.
No command lines, no remote SSH, etc.
Of course different boxes-with-embed-linux exists.
If you actually need print server function in addition to file server, you may best pick a different model which is designed to do it out-of-the-box too.
(They exist too, it usually small boxes with WiFi ethernet ports and a bunch of USB2 ports. You connect either printers and/or disks to the USB2 ports depending on what you want to share).
You still have to install windows (going through all its specific hurdles too), and configure it.
I was telling about ready-to-use enclosures with embed linux.
What you speak about is more related to all those task-specific Linux & BSD distributions as mentioned earlier in this thread (Open Filer, Free NAS, or for exemple SmoothWall if you want more emphasis on a different function).
Also I completely fail to see the point on having a full blown graphical interface on a *file server*. In my opinion, an easy to use web interface would be better suited, specially because it could be used in much more different scenarios (from a PDA, from a gaming console, from a mythbox or similar appliance, etc), whereas the remote desktop will force you to stick with Windows XP & Vista on the desktop size, which is restrictive (but make Microsoft finance happy).
There are numerous solution for backup that exist on Linux.
Some research may be important.
I'm sure that even the cheapest fileserver-enclosures-with-embed-Linux, probably come with some simple software that you can install on a Windows box and that can do backup of you discs to some directory. Absolutely every mass storage you buy (USB2 drive enclosure, removable media like ZIP, CD/DVD burners or even USB sticks) all come with such software, so it's not a stretch to think that some similar software would be offered with the server.
Now for more serious work there are a lot of different software that exists.
Amanda is an exemple of backup solution I've heard about. It can make backup over network, for example, by pulling the files from the backed up machine using Samba shares.
You'll have to do some research but I'm sure you could find a specific and easy to setup distro that is geared toward this kind of function.
It's just that most of my personal experience and most of the example given by others in these threads are more oriented to backups done on the file server it self (user freely does whatever (s)he want with her/his personal network share, the NAS will do snapshot and backups as configured). So we won't be the best persons to help you.
Also, while speaking about different backup strategies, in addition of self-backing up file server, backups over network, just to mention a 3rd strategy : disk imaging / cloning.
There are numerous tools under linux too. There's for exemple PartImage which is
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A quick google query also brought up the names NasBackup and NexentaStor RsyncShare which apparently attempt to make Rsync more user friendly by putting a GUI around it.
Using a Windows software solution like the built-in Backup or similar may actually be meaningful :
- One may want to be able to quickly pull the data back after a complete machine crash and those are the only tools that will be available on the freshly re-installed XP desktop. So if your main goal for a backup is in case of emergency it may be useful to employ the only tools that will be available in those emergency case.
- Of course if you goal is to be able to access ancient versions of file in case you overwrite them, Rsync, Amanda or LVM-Snapshot on the server could be better. (depending on which you could find the most user friendly front-end for)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I can see you may want to have a window on each monitor, but different directory hierarchies and/or local and remote machines pose no problem for a split view.
The statue you cite does not say that.
Missing from this discussion is the fact that WHS offers 2, TWO, ways to back up files: 1. Nightly backups of each PC's drive(s) to very proprietary format under the control of WHS. Restore is the way back, and can be done on a file, directory or volume basis. THIS FEATURE APPEARS NOT TO BE BROKEN BASED ON THE MICROSOFT KB ARTICLE BY INFERENCE. 2. A bunch of networked directories for shared files. THIS IS THE ONE THAT'S BROKEN. The workaround, which Microsoft should definitely post on in an update to their KB article, is simple: a. Copy the shared file or directory to your local PC. b. Change the program to look for the file locally instead of on the shared drive. c. The local file will be saved nightly by the WHS backup. 3. Seems like users are confused by the TWO ways to save files. Shared files will be duplicated (e.g., RAID 1-like) if you have more than one hard drive dedicated to WHS. Nightly backups provides versioning on a daily basis up to the limit of available WHS storage. Shared files have one redundant copy of the current version of the file. Nightly backups give you N versions, but you're toast if the file is lost due to a hardware failure on your local system during the day (because hardly any business or consumer user has RAID 1 or better). And, of course, neither method is going to help if your software screws up the file...which is what WHS seems to be doing to certain shared files. Pete
You mean like maintaining several parallel versions ?
I don't, I use snapshot in a read only fashion for backups.
But according to this HOWTO, snapshot can also work in read/write mode in LVM2.
And thus with snapshoting you could end up with two separate version evolving in an unrelated manner, instead of only using them a "frozen-in-time" copy for backup purpose (like, for exemple, PowerQuest DriveImage 7 and latest version of Norton Ghost do under Windows).
Or you mean : If you start modifying a file in the snapshoted partition the modification will be done on the current partition ?
This could be achieved with something like "unionfs" - it's a file system which allows you to mount several other file systems on the same directory and have different results when you read, write, access a file that only exists in one of the file systems, etc..
I haven't used it yet, but it's extremely popular with liveCD : UnionFS are used for the root configured to read files from the CD but write modification into ram disk, or reading files from a NFS share, but writing modificaiton on local file system, etc.
Maybe with some research you could achieve something like reading files from the snapshot, but writing modification to the active partition.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]