Getting Started With Microsoft Windows Home Server

One of Home Server's coolest features is Restore. You can rebuild a computer, operating system and all, from an archive -- much better than reinstalling the OS, hunting up drivers for all your devices, and reloading files of various ages from backup disks.

The Restore process is pretty well self-contained. You boot up the target PC using the Restore CD. It will likely already have drivers for the hard drive and network devices, but if it doesn't, you can copy them from any archive file on the Home Server -- they're saved in a folder named "Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore" -- and load them from a flash drive. If the disk isn't formatted, the Restore CD includes Disk Manager, an aggressively non-intuitive utility to do the job.

Then you connect to the Home Server, select an archive, and restore it. Simple. Oh, one little thing, just to save you a call to Microsoft's tech support: Restore works only across a wired Ethernet connection. This actually appeared on the Restore console screen, but too late to be of any help in my case. (And the fact that you need to know this indicates that the Home Server documentation is still a little rudimentary.)

Some other minor gotchas:

You can run multiple Home Servers on the same network. You can't back a PC up to more than one server, of course, but if you're security-conscious you might want to use one Home Server to enable remote access to the shared folders and PCs on your network while another, without remote access enabled, handles data you want to keep more locked down. Given the low cost of the hardware and software, you've got options.