Windows Home Server has had it’s fair share of embarrassing issues that really shouldn’t happen to a server. First of all, it didn’t really support the sort of home power users who were buying it, because it didn’t support backing up 64bit systems for the first year after launch. Secondly, it was corrupting files (I personally lost a few photos to that when they were corrupted while rotating them). Thirdly, until recently you couldn’t back up the server itself, so it was a fairly lousy place to store files.

Now a new issue is becoming more common, which is the inability to recover backups. More and more users are reporting that when trying to mount a backup, the process gets to 81% and then gives the error “Cannot mount the backup”. This was meant to be resolved with Power Pack 3, but from personal experience, I can tell you that it is not, even in the final version. To make matters worse, the symptoms are that you can mount a backup once on each client machine, and then never again. So you get the false sense of security that everything is working fine if you check the backups, but it fails as soon as you really need it.

The key thing about the “81%” part of the issue is that this is the percentage that you get to when WHS has built it’s own internal image of the drive as of a certain date and is then about to mount the drive for you. An error at this stage means that the system is basically unable to mount the drive for whatever reason. There are lots of potential reasons for this, such as having a drive already mounted to “Z:”, or having not enough disk space on your system drive on the server, or needing to rebuild your server database.

Unfortunately though for many users, the issue is not that simple. There are lots of feedback issues logged on Connect for this issue, so it’s hitting lots of people. Some have said it is restricted to Windows 7 RC1 too, but I personally have seen the issue on Vista Ultimate 64 bit, Vista Premium 32bit, Windows 7 RC1 and Windows 7 RTM, so I don’t believe it’s just an OS specific issue. At the moment there seems to be no solution in sight.

Update: Last week I tried to do a complete restore of my Media Center, which had got corrupted somehow. It was a complete disaster – it ran for 2 hours then wouldn’t reboot (no boot sector on the hard drive). After several runs through with the System Repair disk, I got it to boot, but it was not a proper restore – my user profile wouldn’t work, and nor would most of the applications. In the end I just did a clean install. Very disappointed in that too. Thank goodness I keep my media on a different partition to my OS.

So, as far as I am concerned, I think that Windows Home Server has failed in the key tasks that it was meant to do. It didn’t store files without corrupting them (fixed now admittedly), and it doesn’t allow you to restore either files or complete partitions. A basic NAS would do a better job. Anyone got any suggestions for a simple alternative OS to put on an HP EX-475 to turn it in to a working dedicated server?

Update 2: I have a solution (kind of). Since none of the backups would restore, there was no point having them, and because of the problem, I wasn’t getting any new backups. So, I decided to delete my entire backup directory and start from scratch. Steps to do this were;

1) Go in to Home Server and remove every computer from the Backup tab.

2) Uninstall the home server connector from all PCs

3) Open a Remote Desktop Connection session to your home server.