Added a backup drive to my Home Server
Adding a hard drive to Home Server is relatively easy to do. I followed the simple instructions over at Home Server Hacks (a great site, BTW).
This works fine if you want to add more storage to your server. But I already have plenty of storage (hey, the box comes with half a terabyte, which is more than I'll need for photo and music files for a very long time). What I really wanted to do was to use the second drive as a backup drive. When I selected this option in the wizard, it gave me an error telling me the drive hadn't been partitioned and that I should partition it and reboot the home server. Weird. So I ignored that advice. Instead I added it as a regular storage drive, and Home Server went ahead and partitioned and formatted it automatically. Then I clicked the "remove" option on the menu, and re-added it as a backup drive. This time no error. I guess I didn't need to reboot after all. No smoke coming from the back of the machine yet...
I also switched on compression on the backup drive. Maybe the backups are already compressed? I don't know. I'll wait and see whether this was a good idea or not.
The main reason I wanted a backup drive within the server is that from now on I won't be storing my files on my PCs. They'll be centralized on the server, so I can get them from anywhere. Hence the server needs to be backing itself up.
To make it easier to use the central file server, I moved my "my documents" folder to the server. To do this, just right-click on your "my documents" icon and open the properties. Then set the target folder to be an appropriate folder on your home server (in my case \\home-server\Users\Robert). Windows then migrates all the files over to the new location.
My next home server project is to use the built-in Windows VPN functionality to access the server from anywhere. That project's on hold since my router doesn't support VPN pass-through (so I've ordered a new one from NewEgg, since I was just looking for an excuse to get a WiFi router with better range anyway...)