Windows Home Server

~ the eulogy ~

The design started from a decision that the machine should be somewhere you never look at it. No monitor and no keyboard, often no video output worth plugging anything into. You set it up once from a laptop and after that it lived in a cupboard or under the stairs with a network cable and a power lead going into it, and the only sign it existed was a small icon in the system tray of every other computer in the house.

Bill Gates announced it at CES on 7 January 2007 and it went on sale on 4 November. Underneath it was Windows Server 2003 R2 with the server parts hidden behind a console that talked about family computers rather than domains. Every PC in the house got a piece of software called the Connector, and from then on each machine was imaged overnight without anyone deciding to do it.

The backup was cleverer than it needed to be. If four computers in the house all had the same copy of a Windows system file, the server kept one copy and pointed the rest at it, which meant the fourth machine took far less space than the first. Restoring was a boot CD and a wait, and it worked on a dead hard drive rather than only on deleted files, which is the difference between a backup product and a backup.

It also handed you a free address at homeserver.com, so a machine in a cupboard in a suburb had a public name and a login page, and you could pull a photo off it from an office on another continent. In 2007 that was a thing individuals did not have.

The problem it solved existed in my house too, which is the awkward part. A decade of photographs on one disk that nobody had ever copied is not an American condition. What did not cross was the answer, because the answer was a second computer running all day, on a broadband line that never went down, in a house with enough PCs to make pooling worth the trouble. The version of the same worry that got sold in Turkey was an external USB disk you plugged in when you remembered, which is a worse product and a much easier sentence to say out loud in a shop.

~ the dossier ~

~ the box with no monitor ~

Microsoft licensed it mainly to hardware partners, and the box people remember is the HP MediaSmart Server, a small white slab with four drive bays and a row of blue lights. There was an OEM disc for around a hundred dollars if you wanted to build your own, which a certain kind of person did, usually out of a retired desktop.

The early months went badly. A bug corrupted files that used NTFS alternate data streams when they were written to a share while the server was busy, which is a narrow condition that happened to catch photo editors and music libraries. Microsoft took most of a year to fix it and shipped the repair in Power Pack 1 in July 2008. The product never fully got out from under that, because the one thing a backup server cannot afford to be is the thing that eats the file.

~ what drive extender did ~

Drive Extender was the feature people actually talked about. You put disks into the machine without matching their sizes or their interfaces, and the server presented all of it as one space with normal folders on top. Adding capacity meant adding a drive, with no rebuild and no array to plan.

On top of that sat duplication, set per folder. Mark the photos folder as duplicated and every file in it lived on two physical disks, so a dead drive cost you nothing except the drive. Mark the recorded television as not duplicated and it used half the space. RAID gave you one policy for the whole box; this gave you a policy per folder, in language a person without a storage vocabulary could use.

~ taking it out ~

On 23 November 2010 Microsoft announced that the next release, then codenamed Vail, would not include Drive Extender. The stated reasons involved enterprise storage plans and problems with applications that expected ordinary disk behavior. The response from the existing users was loud enough to be reported as news, because the feature was not a bullet point on the box, it was the thing the box was for.

Windows Home Server 2011 shipped anyway on 6 April 2011, without it, at a lower price and with a smaller reason to exist. Buying it meant going back to matching disks and thinking about arrays, which is precisely the work the first version had taken away.

~ what replaced it ~

On 5 July 2012, alongside the Windows Server 2012 lineup, Microsoft confirmed that Home Server was finished and that its media and device features were moving into Windows Server 2012 Essentials. Essentials was priced and licensed for small offices, and a small office is not a family. The first version lost support on 8 January 2013 and the 2011 release on 12 April 2016.

The idea did not die with it. Storage Spaces in Windows 8 was Drive Extender's argument rebuilt properly, and the household file server moved to Synology and QNAP boxes that were quieter and did not have an operating system with a start menu inside them. What none of them inherited was the part that made Home Server strange: it backed up other computers by default, without being asked, which is still the only version of this that works on people who do not think about their data at all.

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