This journal was originally rather lengthy. In hopes of more people not Ctrl+W-ing the tab, I've cut through the fluff [;_;] to get to the meaty center.

At least once a month, somebody I'm watching posts a journal about a hard drive death taking a whole swath of their digital life down with it. Invariably, these people don't have their files backed up. All they can do is rage while they hear their hard drive clicking and laying waste to gigabytes of carefully organized music, years of personal logs, artwork which isn't available anywhere else, and whatever else they might have. The common solution offered by folks like  dragoneer is to get an external hard drive and back up your files regularly. And you know, that works fine if you've got a single computer. But if you're under the age of 18 or above the age of 22, and possibly even if you're in that age range, you've got multiple computers on your home network. What do you do? One external drive for each computer? One external drive for a computer that's always on? And what if you have files you want to share between those computers, too? Like a music collection, or video files, or personal documents?

Windows Home Server is a handy ~$100 OS which you can put on old desktops or new systems built specifically for the role. It allows you to pack a computer case to its proverbial gills with hard drives--be they old 80 gig ones you have sitting around, or massive 1500 gig ones purchased to maximize storage--and integrate that storage into your home network. You can make virtual folders which span multiple drives, letting you store terabytes of files in a single 'directory' even if you've only got 320 GB drives. These virtual folders can be accessible by any computer on your home network, or restricted so that only certain users can change the contents or even just read the contents. The server will perform regular (in my case, nightly) backups of all your systems to make sure you never lose more than a day's work, and it does it intelligently so duplicate files only get stored once--no need to keep around gigabytes of duplicate Windows files or MP3s that you've got copies of on each computer. Although while you're at it, why not dump all your MP3s into a single directory on the server, so you can access your music more easily? With a planned update for Home Server, it'll even integrate your files automatically into the Windows 7 libraries, so you don't have to care about where they are.

And if the stuff you're storing on your server is really important to you, personal files or carefully organized music you'd rather not lose, you can enable data redundancy for the virtual folders. The server keeps an extra copy of the files in those folders on more than one drive, so even if one of your hard drives does crash, any files you really care about which were on it exist somewhere else in the system and will be promptly copied over to other drives to again keep them protected. It's not RAID, where you decide up front to commit a certain amount of a certain number of drives to always duplicate data. It's a folder-level redundancy which lets you use two 500 GB drives for 1 TB of non-backed-up data (what you'd typically do), 500 GB of backed-up data (something else you could easily do), or any flexible combination of redundant and non-redundant storage. Starting out with 700 gigs of anime that you don't care too much about losing? No problem. Add in 3 GB of personal documents and music which you want to be backed up and protected from drive failure? All you have to do is click a checkbox. It's a degree of flexibility that you aren't going to get with an external hard drive, NAS system, or Apple's Time Capsule.

So whether you just want your files to automatically be backed up, or you want a comprehensive system with indexed searching across redundant multi-terabyte network shares, Windows Home Server has your networked storage covered. But it doesn't stop there. Indeed, some of the important benefits you'll get will be side-effects of just having the system set up. You don't have to wonder about where you should put your documents or media, put it on the server. If you're having a LAN party and everyone's going to install a particular game or patch, don't put it on DVDs or flash discs--dump it on the server in a public directory. The server becomes your general-purpose file-dump. And because you're keeping most of your bulky files off of your personal computer, you'll probably be fine with a single hard drive, even a 750 gig drive will store a hundred modern games. Backups are smaller and faster. Everything feels more connected and organized. You feel secure in knowing that everything is backed up and an inevitable drive failure will just mean you have a few hundred fewer gigs of storage space until the manufacturer sends a replacement. Knowing this, you might even do riskier things with your computer--putting a couple drives in RAID 0 for example, for dramatically faster hard drive speeds. Who cares if it's more likely to experience a 'cripling' drive crash? You just pop in a new one and restore from your previous night's backup. Trust me. The security you feel from having all your stuff backed up, and the convenience you enjoy by having thousands of gigabytes of networked storage... they're well worth the cost of the OS.

I wrote this up (again, if you'll believe it, this is the shortened version) for several reasons, for those who are curious. First, two years back I had some journals discussing Windows Home Server. Now I have experience with it, and I'd like to share that experience with you. Second, a lot of people still don't have a backup solution, and this is a rather sexy one. Finally, as of late both for myself and some people, I've been seeking out components for a mature, modern home network. In a recent journal I detailed how to turn Blu-ray discs into gorgeous 1080p rips in admittedly large 10-30 gig files. Even a pretty large 1 TB drive will only hold a few dozen, a hundred at most, before it's full up. So where do you store these files in a cost-effective manner? Your WHS box. Grab the most cost-effective or largest drives you can get (1500 GB are good right now) and toss them in for terabytes of space. Sepf and I have over 9000 GB right now, approximately half of the 18000 we could have if we upgraded to exclusively 1500 GB drives.

If you want to make a cheap but good WHS box you will want (assuming you don't have other parts laying around) :
Windows Home Server, $95
A cheap 35-watt CPU, $40
A cheap 6-SATA, 4-PCI-Express port motherboard, $80
2x512 MB DDR2 modules, $28
A generic case with 6 HDD spots, expandable to 12, with 500W power supply, $70

If you've got access to a PCI-Express graphics card and a DVD-ROM drive for about an hour, you can put them in the server for installation, and your grand total is about $300 for the hardware and OS. If not, grab the cheapest graphics card ($25) and the cheapest DVD drive ($20) you can find, and still remove them after installation (they will draw power, after all).

That hardware up there, with your hard drive of choice, will give you a functional system that can house up to 6 hard drives. After that point, you'll need a 3x5.25"-to-4x3.5" drive bay ($23) and a 4 SATA port controller card ($39) for each additional 4 drives you want.

The first case will max out at 12 hard drives, but there's nothing stopping you from getting a second case and power supply, and filling that one up with hard drives as well. Connect the drives to the power supply in the second case, and use long SATA or eSATA cables to connect the drives to the server, simple as that. The practical limit of drives you can physically connect to the motherboard is 6 onboard + 3x4 (PCI-based) and 3x2 (PCI-Express-based) = 24, which is conveniently as many as you can fit in two full towers. Really, if you need any more than that, I think this guide is beyond your scope =P