SBS Redux

So, I posted before my happiness (sic) that Microsoft is basically retiring Windows Home Server in favor of pushing Small Business Server Essentials, and I had made up my mind to pretty much stay on Home Server v1 until the end of time.

Well, my normal A.D.D kicked in and I formatted my server at the house, installed SBS Essentials 2011 and moved about 5 TBs of data across the network.

Windows Update rebooted the machine during the copy, so, well, I copied 5 TBs of data across the network again.

With Home Server gone, I no longer have Drive Extender to seemlessly duplicate my data across multiple drives, and shares are now limited to the size of one drive. To get my movies on one 'drive' I end up spanning a pair of drives together. And to get backups, I know have to set them up manually. I set up a couple drives to store server backups and go to configure my backups.

Now, I wasn't looking to back up the whole drive, just a very small couple of folders off of it, but I don't even get the option to drill into it. So not only have they screwed us out of the convienence of drive extender, now I can't even manually do what was built in before.

That doesn't even cover the fact I don't get Sharepoint or Hyper-V in Essentials. Positive spin, I have found there are a lot of great free options for virtualization out there right now!

I am off to download the sync toys to set up some file replication to get backups going. I have been a HUGE Microsoft fan for a really long time, but I have to say, they are making it hard to drink the Koolaid anymore.