I was at Microsoft a few days back and a buddy of mine that works there mentioned something about a new product called Home Server. He was eager to get one but they didn't have them available yet. In short Home Server is a long awaited solution for managing the growing amounts of content for families in the digital age. I for one have 3 computers in my home and only 1 is regularly backed up. I hear the horror stories of tech friends that don't have any kind of backup. Pictures, videos, documents...essentially years of data gone when their hard drive fails. Although there are several backup softwares out there not many of them are very user friendly. Also, unless you have a PC dedicated as a file server that is backed up or has a raid array with tons of storage, you can't easily back up all of data from multiple machines. Home Server addresses these issues, but does it do it well and for a fair price?
At around $750 you get an HP MediaSmart Home Server with 1 TB (that's Terra Bytes or 1,000 GB) with a 1.8Ghz AMD processor and 512 MB of memory. For about $150 less you can get the same setup with only 500 GB. Let's talk about what you get for that price.
One selling point of Home Server is that it not only acts as a backup solution but also a central point for all of your media. This is something that Media Center tried to do by allowing multiple computers to talk to a Media Center PC. In Home Server you can setup your own web site and share folders that contain your digital library. My original skepticism was that if there is no backup for Home Server then what happens when one of the disk should fail? All of your centralized media would be lost. Never fear, Microsoft has developed a new technology called Drive Extender. It allows you to specify backup locations on additional hard drives (whether local or connected through USB\Firewire) to keep copies of the content in your shared folders. Essentially this should protect you against a single hard disk failure. Nice!
Another nice feature is the ability to create a private web site that allows you to share content from other PCs in your home to other people on the web. You can create up to 10 accounts with Home Server. Part of the setup process for Home Server allows you to register a sub domain name of homeserver.com for free! So you can have http://<myFamilyName>.HomeServer.com as your domain name which allows you to access your shared information and remote control other PCs in your home from virtually anywhere there is a web connection.
Keep in mind that some of the features that Home Server touts will require some pretty good technical knowledge. Firewall and Router ports may need to be forwarded and\or opened. Microsoft provides all of that information for you but knowing how to do it and understanding the purpose behind it will be something most people lack. Once again keeping it from the reach of main stream users. Techs that have this savvy may already be doing some of these things, just not in a pretty fashion. To be honest, if the price was about $200-300 less a lot more people would jump on it. If Home Server features also included administering your other PC accounts, like what computer someone was allowed to log onto and what times of day or limit total time on PC (I am thinking about parents monitoring if you can't already tell) then that would certainly add some more value. As other competitors jump on the scene we should see the hardward prices coming down a good deal. Overall Home Server really seems like a fine product. As more features are added it can certainly become the center piece of the modern home technical infrastructure.