Hal Berenson over at hal2020.com has provided an interesting commentary on the demise of Windows Home Server (WHS). In it he talks a bit about the history of WHS and WHS 2011, and discusses the alternatives that are and will be available:
From the moment that WHS launched it was under assault from a range of alternatives, none of which were as good as the package but all of which were more than adequate for their individual task. Windows client had long had facilities for Shared Folders, and when Windows 7 added HomeGroups they really became easily managed by consumers. Why set up yet another system in your house when you could easily designated one Windows PC to hold your shares? You could even use Windows Backup, as mediocre as it is, to backup your various PCs to those shares. Or why not buy a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive, today a 2TB WD My Book Live is running around $150, and have a backup and share solution for perhaps 1/3 of the cost of an equivalent WHS server. And then came the problem of Disaster Recovery…what happens to your data when a wildfire sweeps down into your city and burns your house to ground, as just happened in Colorado Springs? You really want your key data backed up in the Cloud. Remote Access? Well there are numerous solutions, including multiple from Microsoft.
After discussing the problem of backing up large collections of media such as photographs, he concludes by suggesting the market has peaked for local network storage as a backup location:
There will always be a place for LAN-based shares and backups for some power users (be those computer power users or semi-pro photograhers/videographers), but the general market has peaked. The trend, and it’s a strong one, is to put our data in the cloud.
As he suggests, most computer users will not implement any backup solution at all - and I am afraid that for many of them this will be a decision they regret.
For the rest of us, we should buy a copy of Windows Home Server while it is still available.
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