now that I've already covered in a separate video how to set up the user
accounts on Windows Home Server as well as I have covered how to configure
computer backups computer backups are probably one of the biggest killer
features of a Home Server let's talk about the next killer feature of Home
Server the shared folders and what all of that means so there are several ways
to access the shared folders you can either access them through the regular
Network um PC navigation so you just go
on to TS mini and then you can browse all the folders available on the Home
Server there uh the setup wizard also creates a shortcut on your desktop to
your shared folders on the Windows Home Server and then the last uh most common
way is to access it through the uh icon
in the bottom right so you just click shared folder so once that's open you
can go ahead and browse all the F all the folders that are automatically
created by Home Server and find your way into the user folder so I'm in the Linus
folder where right now there is nothing but I'm going to go ahead and show off
the speed of Windows Home Server now bearing in mind that Home Server is
running on a a feeble Atom Processor so this isn't
exactly a speed demon computer here Home
Server does not need a whole lot of resources to run wicked fast for file
serving so you can sustain about 80 70 to 80 megabytes per second with large
files so I just copied how much is this
467 Megs to my home server and just a couple seconds there which is a pretty
nice feature so let's do another 360
Megs and uh yeah so that took about four
or five seconds which is terrific but
that's not all but wait there's more
right here you can see I have duplication enabled for the lonus
folder so what duplication means I'm going to go ahead and go into properties
here so here we go here is the name of
the Linus folder the description for the Linus folder and enable folder
duplication I have two hard drives right now in my Windows Home Server if I go
into the server storage I can see right here I have two identical 500 gig drives
and what duplication does is you can see right here the shared folders are 137
Megs and duplication is 137 Megs what it
does is it takes everything in a duplication enabled folder and make sure
that it is always on at least two
physical drives within the Home Server that means that if one of my drives dies
or is removed or is struck by lightning or whatever happens my data will be safe
now that doesn't mean that Home Server is completely immune to things like
virus infected files it's not going to fix problems that you cause but if you
are in danger of a physical failure
causing you to lose your data Windows Home Server will protect you in 99% of
cases now the duplication is not a hardware r solution it is more like a
software raid solution so that means it is not real time but it's fairly close
to real time I've actually had several drives die in my Home Server which I
have about six hard drives in right now and I have never lost an important piece
of data that means I've never lost any data in one of my duplicated folders now
I did set certain things like the public folder to not be duplicated and I have
lost files from there but I don't care about those files so that is the other
huge huge feature of Windows Home Server you can also add other folders like you
could say uh oh no I'm in users whoops you can add folders like uh let's say
this is the Expendable
folder okay I'm not going to enable folder duplication because I don't care
about this data I can configure it so that any guest has full access and Linus
has full access to this folder so this is just going to be some random folder
that means that the data in the Expendable folder will not take up
double the space because every Meg I write to Linus is going to be actually
written two Megs to two separate drives
Expendable will only write one Meg to one drive so it means it takes up less
space but it's also less safe thank you for checking out my video on Windows
Home servers shared folder and
duplication features