Welcome to the digitallifestyle.com Video Show. This is the first video show from digitallifestyle.com. The one I thought I’d show today is Windows Home Server. So, this is a Windows Vista Client Machine connected to a Windows Home Server and I’ve got another device, another cool device actually connected by the network.
So, when you first get on to your Vista PC, you’ll notice you’ve got an extra icon down here which is a Windows Home Server, and this is showing that the network health is at risk. If we right click on the icon task bar, you could see we can go to the console, we can do a backup which we’re going to look at in a moment and we’re going to look at share folders. So first, I’m going to look at the Windows Home Server console and ask for a password and I’ll enter now and click ‘connect’. There is really no need to go on the Windows Home Server at all, you can use, you know, headless mode without keyboard or mouse or display. But first, today, we’re going to look at desktop at the Home Server, but this is actually the only application you need to console. So, here you can see a number of machines on network, we’ve got—the Alonso machine is actually the machine we’re on now. We’ve got a laptop that’s connected to powered up and connected up, there’s tablet and another Vista machine.
So let’s first look at some backup options. So, I’m going to look at this machine around now the Alonso which is a Vista machine that we’re on now. I can have a look at that, backups and you’ll see there are some in complete manual backup and some automatic ones. The options to the backups are really simple. Once you’ve installed the home server client it automatically backups at—I think it’s 1 AM or you can see the time anyway. And you can see it actually manages the backups of those completely. So, most of the time, complete backup has been done and this is a pretty big backup for this machine because it’s got a lot of recorded TV content on there.
So, there’s all my backups now. I will have a look at how we can get into those backups in a moment. If we have a look at there, configuring the backup, you can try to exclude certain folders from the backup. For example, you don’t want to backup the template into those files, you don’t need to backup directory. And maybe that you choose not to backup ripped DVDs folder, things like that. So, this is the wizard you can use to actually set the backup details. By default, it does actually exclude some folders like set the template internet folders, this is some of the obvious ones. Here, you can see, there’s a few hard disk on this machine, I’ve got backup to C drive and the said drive, and I can pick some folders which I’d like to exclude. And that’s it, backup wizard is really on there. From this console now, I can just do backup now on any of the machines. I don’t have to go on to the one that’s running the backup. So, I could go on to this laptop, do a backup now and that would kick a backup off. We now have wireless, we now have a LAN. It doesn’t matter, it all works.
And now, notice up here we’ve got a health risk, the network health risk. If I look into that, you can see why and that’s because of the tablet PC has backed up since the 24th of February. So that’s showing really the warning that the backup is not running. So, it does monitor everything, it also shows up on there if any of the machines anti-viruses is out of date, if Firewall switched off and those kind of security. So, you can use this really to make sure that everything is running really on the local network. But don’t worry, the Windows Home Server helps within synchronizing passwords. So, it’s not like an active directory domain where you have one central store of passwords. But if I logged on to here with my user account, say the index account, and then go to another device on the network with the index account and that’s got the same account name but with a different password. It’ll say to you that, “This password that you’re using is out-of-date or is not synchronized with the network. Do you want to use your existing password or do you want to use the one stored on Windows Home Server?” And that allows you to synchronize passwords that way.
Shared folders in there, is really interested on Windows Home Server. Each person has a shared folders and there are public shared folders. There you see, there’s music, photos, software, and that’s actually a custom one, I created there for recorded TV. And then there’s used ones. Unless the duplicate folder, duplication is disabled on all the folders apart from Kim’s account, that duplication means that the content is spread across multiple hard disks. So if your home server’s got two hard disk and one of the hard disk goes, then the contents of the Kim folder will be duplicated in both. So, you’ve got that visually in there. So, in this case I’ve set this on that one folder but you would probably set that say for your photos folder or specific folders, but you probably wouldn’t set it on let’s say software that you’ve got on a CD and it’s just on the server for convenience. So, you’ve got the choice of doing it either way.
You’ll also notice it’s got a nice UI of space utilization over time as you can see from this example. It started up fairly low and it’s run probably a period time and it leveled off and that’s as I introduced the machines onto the network, and then as it settled down over the last few days. From the server storage tap, you could see that I’ve got two drives built in the machines, and we’ve got a nice visual representation of what’s being used. So, you could see the majority of this disk actually just being user backups, because that’s what I’ve kind of got into first with the home server.
And have a look down here at the settings, and you can see some of the settings. So we’ve got the general, the option to shutdown, automatic updates on. I’ve got the backup time, so the window really is between 12 AM and 7 AM. We’ve got the account management, a backup clean up and it automatically deletes all backups which you can set over in the backup options which when we look at the backup, you could see which ones you wanted to get rid off.
There’s a generic account for the home server, and there’s some folder sharing options, and the media sharing ones here are actually Windows Media connect. So, from an Xbox 360 or from some rock and roll cool sound bridge, you can connect into this and you can share music, photos, and videos. One thing it doesn’t do, which obviously media center enthusiastic are going to want, is for it to do sort of your media center user interface with an extender. So, you still need a media center PC to be able to do that, extend the live TV type sharing. It’s a shame that feature’s not in there, but it’s been something that we’ve talked about with the home server team.
Okay, that’s it for part one, looking at Windows Home Server. In part one, we’re going to look at—actually delving into the backups and having a look at how we restore a single file from the backups. And we’re going to have a look a little bit, how the backup works and perhaps one of the nicest features is the remote interface. How I can use it from, through the web, I can get on to my machine, remote desktop on to any of the machines on the network, remote desktop server, and to have a web based UI to download files. So, it’s pretty, pretty interesting really to see, how you can transfer files over the web.
So, we’re going to look at that in part two. Thanks for watching part one. I’ll see you on digitallifestyle.com.
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