I'm super excited to say that T-Money has joined the team! Tony is at orientation this week in Redmond and will start drinking from the firehose shortly. :)
To be honest, I was skeptical when Windows Home Server was originally announced. At the time, I was already using Windows OneCare Backup for my family's computers and I was using using Acronis for the computers I personally use on a daily basis. Acronis failed me when I had a massive disk failure and it was not able to restore my backup. Talk about not being happy. After that I switched to ShadowProtect and I have been extremely pleased. I had another failure and ShadowProtect was able to restore without a hitch, including using third-party RAID drivers. They only issue with ShadowProtect is the size of backups. I have roughly 270 GB that make up my system drive and personal data. This doesn't include my virtual machines, which I don't backup. ShadowProtect does image based full and incremental backups. There is a way to make it do differentials, but the implementation was not very useful to me. I also defrag frequently, which caused the backup size to artificially inflate. When I came across the Windows Home Server Technical Brief for Home Computer Backup and Restore whitepaper it sounded too good to be true, so I decided to evaluate the product. I've been running WHS full backups daily for 3 months now. The backups for 5 computers only occupies 358 GB! And that is with every computer defragging every night. It is hard to wrap your head around how that is possible without reading the whitepaper. This brilliant piece of technology is the killer WHS app for me; everything else is just gravy.