Now, I should know better. Being an Architect of Enterprise Scale applications (millions of transactions, hundreds of thousands of messages a day and database tables the size you’ve never seen), I should know and preach the power of more memory.

However, I, for some crazy reason, have ignored my own instincts for a long time with respect to my own Home Server.

“It’s only storing my Audio and Video and running backups. Microsoft clearly calls out 512Mb as the recommended memory for a ‘typical’ WHS” I kept thinking. So why bother upgrading?

Well two things changed my mind: -

1. I demonstrated remote access to a colleague the other day and viewing WebGuide was really really slow
2. My WHS over the last few weeks has started to become a little more of a work horse, with some new planned blogs and sites running on it while in their design stage (resulting in both mySQL and SQL Server being required…)

So Friday just gone, I ordered 2Gb of memory online to add to the already paltry 512Mb. It arrived this morning so having just put it in, I booted the server up.

One area where performance has increased exponentially is with the Remote Console (a very cleverly disguised Remote Desktop Session). Prior to this, performance was only adequate (even before I added RDBMS’s to it). However the UI now absolutely flies with switching between the difference ‘tabs’ being almost instantaneous.

With more and more add-ins coming out for WHS, I suspect a great many people with experience the same degrading performance as they add more and more functionality to the server without being aware that simply adding more RAM will speed it up.

However, one challenge here is the fixed Sku’s of certain WHS’s (unless you build your own like I did). The HP Media Smart range of servers for instance, has no official way as yet to upgrade memory so doing so invariably invalidates your warranty. I believe they are aware of this concern though and are currently preparing an upgrade path for customers.

As a final thought, I should have done this six months ago. Knowing Windows as well as I do, I also know Windows ‘loves’ as much memory as you throw at it so if you think, or even suspect, your server/desktop is swapping to disk often, upgrade the RAM, the difference will be like night and day.

On that note, I sourced my memory from Orca in the UK. The memory was shipped within 45 minutes of me ordering it online on Friday and arrived here in Ireland on the Monday. Can’t ask for more than that.

So, I've been using WHS now since the beginning of the year and as with my previous posts on WHS, everything just 'works'.

I haven't experienced any issues and overall my network, numerous PC's and overall data storage are in a far better state than they ever were.

With the release of Power Pack 1 (and the fix for the data corruption bug), my entire photo gallery is now held natively on the server with Windows Photo Gallery accessing this directly (management of Tags, ratings etc). Prior to PP1, this was something that was risky if you had multiple drives and because of this,the photo's, until recently were stored locally on my main Vista desktop.

One aspect of my new regime that hadn't as yet been truly investigated was online backup (no real reason, just simply not enough time). However, after looking at the storage the other day, I had to be honest with myself and admit that some of that data is truly critical and irreplaceable (the 19Gb of photo's is high on that list believe me).

Yes, I duplicate everything at the moment over at least 2 disks (as I have the space) but there's still that risk of catastrophic failure. There's over 6 years of photo's there and losing them would be heartbreaking.

So I've finally taken the plunge and opted to add into my backup strategy an online portion.

One aspect that was important is obviously integration with WHS as this will always be my primary backup and storage source for all of the data held in the house.

My approach is pretty straight forward: -

• Use WHS Backup's as my primary backup strategy (and why not? As it just works *so* well)
• Use the WHS shares (with all important data duplicated over two drives) as my main storage for public and common files used by everyone in the household (Music, Photo's, Video's, Shared docs etc)
• Compliment this with off-site storage for all absolutely critical content and files on the WHS that I cannot be without in the event of having to 'start again'

This approach will give a pretty consistent approach in the unlucky event of a failure/catastrophe:-

• In the event of a Media failure (a hard disk in the WHS), remove the failed disk and replace. Absolutely no 'downtime' and all files are always available
• In the event of a desktop/laptop failure (HDD, O/S corruption etc), restore from a WHS restoration image
• In the event of a serious catastrophe, all files I can't easily obtain again will be stored offsite and can easily be restored once the WHS is back up and running again

After looking around at a number of options, I've decided to use Amazon's S3 service and Jungle Disk's WHS add-on to manage this aspect.

One of the advantages (or disadvantages depending on how the S3 service is used) is that it's not fixed price (but then it doesn't have any data limits either), and you only pay for the storage you use.

Given my strategy (restoration from offsite storage is absolutely last resort and only for critical content I can't easily re-obtain/recreate) this approach will actually me cost pretty much next to nothing on a month by month basis and will grow and scale as I need in the future.

Had I chosen to use Jungle Disk on my desktop's as my main primary backup strategy, my usage and thus cost, would I'm sure be more significant (as you do also pay for 'requests' for the data as well as putting data in and out). However, with the strategy above, I estimate storing all of my essential content will only cost me between €2-€3.50/month

So I suppose a lot of you would be asking, well this is never going to happen to me, so why do I need to backup my data so securely? Unsurprisingly as we all know, PC's are being used more and more. But then surprisingly, the absolutely lack of awareness to the importance of backups really still passes most people by.

However it DOES happen; A family member for instance, recently had GCSE grades lower than expected due to losing all of their coursework on the family computer. My good friend (Paul Hammond) came back from holiday to find his hard disks had failed. It happens. Period.

Now saying the above, I've luckily never, in all the time I've been in IT, experienced a Hard Drive failure or serious data loss. However, I've seen it happen to too many people I know and I for one, am now glad that I've finally put in place the final element to ensure I'm protected.