I don't know who "they" are but Acronis lists Home at
$49.99 and it's
$29.99 at Newegg.
Acronis offers free licenses from time to time for people who have agreed to beta test products, made volume purchases of client licenses or have purchased server licenses. I'm in all three categories. I get offered free licenses three or four times a year.
On top of that, anyone who has a
Seagate or
Maxtor drive attached to their PC can install a rebranded version of TrueImage.
True Image doesn't do the data de-duplication and WHS lets you go back ("Time Machine" effect) up to 90 days (by default). It's probably close to a wash in terms of required storage space.
Only on supported Windows machines. *My* home environment has Linux and OSX systems (though ironically not any Macs any more) as well.
For what it's worth, I consider the Windows and Program Files folders to be entirely expendable; those would presumably benefit most from data de-duplication, but you should be storing media and user created data centrally way.
TI will also store backups locally or on a network share (or FTP location, even), which is very handy if you've ever had to wait for 140GB of stuff to copy over 100Mbit.
Fushigi said:
And as noted the "SoftRAID" capability is built in.
Technically, SoftRAID is built into EVERY version of NT-based Windows. A little noodling with some config files and a couple registry settings lets XP or even 2000 Workstation to create Striped Volumes with Parity (RAID5).
It looks like WHS isn't doing RAID in the first place, but just copying data to more than one hard drive. I implement that strategy, too, but I'm doing that on top of the fault-tolerant arrays.
On Windows Striped Volumes with Parity, to expand the volume requires copying all the data off, deleting the original volume and recreating it with added capacity. That's lame.
At the same time, I - I don't know about anyone else - need the ability to create enormous contiguous spaces for data storage. A piddling 1 or 2TB isn't going to cut it for me. This is als a benefit of RAID. I need that. I think that's important.
Granted that I can use Windows Server whenever I like, and there are situations where I do use it. It's an acceptable desktop for me, for example.
But if what I care about is mass file storage, I'm doing that on a Linux system because it is vastly more flexible in how it presents storage to the rest of the network. That is very important and useful, and if it's less than automatic, I don't mind a bit, since it's giving me something that Windows just DOESN'T.
