I have been using a Windows Home Server 2011 machine as my central backup and quasi-NAS solution for the past three years. About 6 months ago, I had a rather terrible experience with Windows Home Server – I have 3 other computers at home that regularly backup to the WHS every night. On my main desktop one of my oldest hard drives started dying – unfortunately, I don’t run SMART monitoring tools on any of my machines, so I didn’t realize the drive was failing till later when the machine started becoming very slow to boot (basically Windows was trying its hardest to get the drive to work and the timeouts were killing the boot process). I ordered a replacement drive, but left the broken drive hooked up and enabled (don’t ask – sometimes I do stupid things). The next day, I opened up the machine with the faulty hard drive (after disabling the drive in diskmgmt.msc) and unhooked it completely.
At this point, I went on to try to open the backup that should’ve existed in the WHS to verify that I would be able to get back the data on the failed drive. What I found was that for some reason, the backup service on WHS wasn’t running. A quick check in event logs showed that the service was starting up and crashing repeatedly – uh-oh. Even worse, it had only started happening in the last 2 days – right around the time the drive (which wasn’t in WHS but was being backed up to it) started failing. After rooting about a bit, I found the location where this service logs into text files and found that it was trying to enumerate and verify all the large backup files and was encountering read errors in one of them. I was still naive enough to believe that by some really bad coincidence, I was having two drives fail on me simultaneously – the one drive on my machine and the other containing my backups in WHS. I ran chkdsk on the WHS backup drive and it came up clean. At this point, I was pretty sure that the issue wasn’t the drive but a catastrophic bug in WHS.
Without the backup service running, there is no way to get to the backed up data on a WHS. So, after a lot of deliberation the only course of action left in front of me was to try deleting the file that was causing the backup service to crash and see what happens. I deleted the contentious file and started the WHS backup service – what happened next was really ugly. When the backup service started back up, it “recovered” from the missing file by essentially deleting all the automatic backups!!! Talk about terrible design – to recap, a product whose main reason to exist is to serve as a safeguard for your data not only fails you at a critical time, but in addition “recovers” by screwing you over even worse. At this point, I reached the inescapable conclusion that WHS as a backup solution is worse than useless – it was downright malicious as it lulls users into a false sense of security that simply doesn’t exist.
There is a silver lining to this story – the drive I lost was an old drive which had valuable data (pictures, videos and what not), but wasn’t actively being used. It was essentially cold storage for data that hadn’t been updated in over 2 or 3 years. The machine with the drive that failed was updated from Windows 7 to Windows 8 around six months before the drive failure – at the time of the update, I had kicked off a full manual backup of all the drives on the machine and also marked that backup to be retained indefinitely by WHS. Turned out that WHS retained that manual backup and I was able to recover the data in the lost drive from that backup. While it may seem like WHS ultimately helped me recover the data, this is more due to dumb luck and some extraordinary coincidental actions on my part.
On top of all this, there’s also the small fact that WHS has basically been abandoned by Microsoft. It was time to break up with WHS and find a new home for my data.
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