Windows Home Server
For many people, a home network is a great way to share an internet connection. For some more adventurous it’s a way to share files between computers as well. The even more savvy use a network to do many things like tranfer files, backups, shared program databases, media sharing, printing, and many other things. This can be a bit daunting for the average home user that just wants to surf the web from any computer and maybe some wireless to use their laptop in the kitchen.
There are advantages though to having something a little more robust going on in the house. Along comes Windows Home Server. WHS is designed to be a simplified version of the server software used in businesses. It is meant to be used by families or people who aren’t such geeks that they have home built servers in their closets – but could still gain from the advantages of what is called a headless server (“headless” refers to a computer without a monitor and controlled remotely).
You can read up at the product site for some of the features and you can go here to see a screenshot tour and some commentary on the product.
Here are the basic advantages for a home with more than one computer:
- Regular backups
- Central location for files and data
- Secondary location for storage
- Media Server
- Remote file access
Now, to be honest… this is really only useful in a household where there are multiple computers. If you have only one computer, you can get similar results with some software and a large external USB or network drive.
So… this does look promising and it will likely bring the networking robustness of a home more prominence for the average computer user. It will probably fall under the “cool but do I need it?” catagory for many people though … I tell ya’ though — many people felt the same way about broadband. You may not need it, but it sure is useful.
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