By Philip Churchill on September 22nd, 2012
Windows 8 – A Cheap, Effective Home Server
Instead of using Windows Home Server, tech writer Woody Leonhard suggests using Windows 8 as a cheap, effective home server.
Woody takes us through the pieces required to build a Win8 server and how to install and run Win8 Pro as a server. He also includes details on how to setup SkyDrive and Fetch which lets you access files on the Win8 server from any Web browser anywhere in the world.
You can find Woody’s guide here.
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Good luck about trying to restore another computer in your network without WHS and see how long that takes you. Not half an hour that’s for sure.
Woody’s proposal to match the centralized, single-instance, elegant and simple to use backup mechanism for client PCs that WHS has is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
I’m not impressed.
Why replace WHS 2011 at all? Its not going to suddenly stop working just because MS aren’t making a direct replacement. Its in full support until late 2014 and extended support until 2019. Unless there’s some new generation of hardware that comes out that won’t be supported by the Win 2008 R2 codebase, what’s the rush?
It’s not going to suddenly stop working, but it already has limitations that will increasingly impact its usefulness.
1) You can’t take more than a 2TB backup of your server data using WHS 2011 server backup function.
2) WHS 2011 cannot backup/restore client PCs that use UEFI/GPT technology. What do all modern PCs use these days? Yup, UEFI/GPT technology.
When you get your brand-new Microsoft Surface, just be aware that you can’t use WHS 2011 to back it up.
Both of these issues are fixed in Windows Server 2012 Essentials of course, but at $425 for a license, I doubt that many home users will see that as the successor to WHS 2011.