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Home Server
Posted by rod@drury.net.nz in Apple, Microsoft at 5:41 pm on Thursday, 20 September 2007

At the ConnectioNZ marketplace DaveR from Microsoft showed me the new Home Server product.

It’s a NAS box, headless and provides a centralized storage model for your house.

What impressed me was how great this works with a feature in Windows I really, really miss in the Mac world.  Not sure if it’s still called ‘briefcase’ or ‘offline folders’ but essentially you can assign a local folder to be an offline folder, which means that data is stored on your local disk.  Whether you are on or off the network you access that folder tree. Whenever you connect to your network Windows silently keeps the local folder and a network folder in sync.

It’s like a do nothing back up  and you always have confidence that your documents are backed up.

Under a Mac you seem to need a thrid party tool like ChronSync, but this works on schedule rather than a network connect and I don’t complete trust what it does.

Combining ‘offline folders’ with ‘Home Server’ is really cool because you can load photos music and video locally and when on the road - as soon as you connect it’s sync’d to the home server and available from any device on the network.

This is a very broken thing in the Mac world where your photo’s, iTunes and docs are on your local PC and it’s really hard to centralize them. The Mac network is more peer to peer.  You load photos onto your laptop and that sync’s to the AppleTV, to your iPods etc. Wifey’s photos are on her machine and mine are on mine. Broken.

I like seeing enterprise technology simplified to solve consumer scenarios in the home.

I hope Leopard improves this for Mac users (I haven’t seen anything around this yet).

Great opportunity for a local ISV to write a Home Server to ISP trickle/diff back up service so the Home Server can be backing up changes silently off site as it has bandwidth.  Though imagine what that terrabyte of kids photos and HD birthday party movies  does to your data cap (sigh).

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Comments(2)

    Comment by Lance at 10:48 am on 21 September 2007

    I agree, although dot mac and backup provide me daily and weekly backups of critical and all files

    It seems Time Machine is the answer we all desire - roll on Leopard




    Comment by ChrisW at 9:52 am on 24 September 2007

    I haven’t tried it but http://www.net24.co.nz provide an on-line backup service and have a deal with Snap Internet oferring unlimited data transfer