How WHS Stole Christmas
Long story short…
Windows Home Server has a hellaciously bad data corruption bug that made it into the shipping product.
It’s a semi-crapshoot whether your data will be affected, as it all depends on how the particular application you are using actually saves its data.
But photo and media files are particularly at risk, evidently. And since pix and vidz are the only truly irreplaceable possessions that any family has…
THIS IS A SHOWSTOPPING ISSUE!
MS has a KB article already about the problem with WHS. There’s no fix yet, only a link to one of Mr. Russinovich’s incomparable utilities that will tell you if any of your applications save their data in the way that WHS will mangle. Unfortunately for WHS users with data already mangles, this makes that utility roughly akin to the idiot lights so popular in cars that illuminate only after you’re already suffering a catastrophic engine/transmission/alternator/radiator failure.
The best and only workaround?
QUIT USING WINDOWS HOME SERVER RIGHT.HELL.NOW!
For the record, I called this regarding WHS over a year ago. At least from the perspective of a single point of failure for home user data.
No matter how crazy/sexxay/cool a piece of tech may be, you never ever ever EVER rely on a single copy of your data. Why? Because it doesn’t take a catastrophic failure to cause a major loss of data.
Those of us who have ever been into the blood & guts of servers for any period of time know that a bad controller/driver combo can cause similar data corruption. So can bad memory. So can particularly nasty virii. A system admin’s worst nightmare is a data corruption issue that goes undetected for a while. Months even.
Heck, in that case you’d be wishing it had been some large catastrophic event. Because then you’d have known, and the window of data corruption/loss would have been minimized.
You see…
It’s never truly the server that ultimately preserves data integrity and defends against data loss. It’s the expertise and competence of the admin/admins behind a given system.
And the weakest link of WHS isn’t that it corrupts data. The real problem with WHS lies with the false premise that the magic of a server is absolute, which gives a whole raft of people who have no earthly idea how to go about adequately managing and protecting their data an entirely false sense of security.
So even if WHS wasn’t corrupting data, it would still be putting that data at risk.
Which totally stinks, no matter how you slice it.
|| posted by chris under clueless, media, migration, rx, thumbs down || || ||
