I finally ran through the Server Recovery process on my HP EX495 Windows Home Server over the weekend. My WHS has been acting up for a while now and I have been unable to fix it. It was visible on my home network through \\ServerName mapping but WHS Connector wouldn’t work and the Server had stopped backing up the clients.
A WHS that doesn’t do backups isn’t real useful, it is just an expensive media and file server. After trying to track down a solution several times over the last two months, I gave up and decided I’d have to do a Server Recovery. I was apprehensive about doing this to say the least. I have all of our family pictures on my WHS so I needed to copy them to another drive before I could go through the recovery process even though it is supposed to be non-destructive. I also had some video and a reasonably large music library. All in all, about 4.5GB of stuff to copy somewhere while I did the recovery.
Thanksgiving weekend seemed like a good weekend to do this since I would be home and could monitor the process I expected to take a while. Copying all of the pictures took the longest – I have about 35,000 digital pictures spanning about 10 years – they pile up! Once I got everything copied and felt that if everything disappeared I wouldn’t be completely SOL, I started the recovery process. I followed the procedure and it went exactly as described. The whole process took about two hours and left me with a WHS which was working again. I was thrilled to see that none of my data was gone – everything (pictures, videos, music, etc.) was all there just as it was before I did the recovery. Whew!
The server was a bit slow throughout the day as in addition to trying to reconfigure all of the clients, of which I have seven or eight, the WHS was also updating itself with the various Windows Updates which have been released since the media was created.
This morning I got up to check on it and was happy to see that my laptop had been backed up and my wife’s PC was almost done. Yeah. A level of comfort has been restored. I am not exactly sure why my WHS went AWOL on me, I added to modules to it: Tivo and McAfee. I no longer use a Tivo so there is zero reason to re-install that and I am on the fence about McAfee. Actually, based on this article, it looks like there is no reason to install McAfee again since it isn’t supported any longer. Avast appears to be an option, I’ll have to do some digging to see if it will really work. I have no desire to go through this process again anytime soon!