I am or well I use to be a very risky PC user, I never use to back up! Until a few days ago when my PC crashed. I lost all of my precious multimedia. So now I am taking drastic action, I am looking for the ultimate back up solution. I looked at a NAS solution but, it didn't tickle my fancies as much as a Windows Home Sever box does.

A Windows home server box will enable me to back up and stream all my data as well as not hurting my wallet as much as a NAS would. Why are NAS boxes so expensive, seriously?

But one thing that confuses me about the windows home server that confuses me is how much storage do i need?

I am thinking just two terabyte drives will do the job but, I am still having some doubts. So decided to do an experiment. I set a 320GB external drive as my back up drive for my PC, I am backing it up everyday until I run out of room. So, by the end of the experiment I will know how long 320GB will last me and calculate my storage needs accordingly. Have you got another idea?

What would really help in my research would be my fellow geeks input. How much storage do you need for your back ups and how much do you add on for room to grow?

Tags: home, server, windows

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Comment by Nicholas Sten on March 30, 2010 at 12:45pm: After having run several FreeNAS and OpenFiler home-built NASes, I finally sprung for a commercial solution for the home. My research led to to QNAP and I could not be happier. For the last nine months, I have been running the TS-509 Pro with five 1.5TB drives and I'm finally out of space. I'll be upgrading to the TS-859 with 2TB drives soon enough, though.

QNAP's devices are friendly, stable, fast, efficient, highly customizable, and just all-around pretty polished NAS badassery. Highly recommended.

-N

Comment by Karl on March 29, 2010 at 11:11pm: Depending on how much data you need t back up with as well. I have one main machine with windows XP and two internet Hard drives. One where my important documents I use. And a secondary drive where I can easily transfer the data over to as I need to from one drive to another without worrying. If I need to bring documents with me to work or where I need to go I simply use a external usb drive either with a 20-100 gig external 2.5 inch drive. Or one of my other larger 20 gig hard drives with it's own power supply. One thing you might want to consider in as well. Windows home server might not support this as well. But I do know that Windows 2003 does support this as well. And you can install at least 2 2gigabyte drives on it. And you can easily create a multimedia server from that as well as a web server combined with it on your local lan. That is another one you can do on your own as well.

I have two other web servers over here on my won that I use and a new one that I use to create a testing machine with Oracle 1g that I'll be putting on it when time permites.

Comment by James Hill on March 29, 2010 at 3:38am: Nice, I was looking at NAS but I just want the extra features from the WHS.

Comment by JT on March 28, 2010 at 10:01pm: I back up my whole machine to an External 1.5 Terabyte USB Hard Drive. I use Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery Desktop Edition. I back my machines up once a week and create a new Recovery Point once a month. I think that I need a 3 Terabyte External or Network Drive.

Did you know that Linksys has a Network Connector made for USB Drives? You can create your own NAS.

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