[hermy65]

Im fairly new to the whole Home Server arena and ive been able to find the answers to all my questions about it except for one. Can someone tell me how recovery works. I have 6 1TB hard drives in my machine all holding very important information, what happens if one of my drives goes bad? Do I lose all of the data on that drive? Am i able to recover lost data to whatever open space i have left in my system? If so, how do I go about doing this so i know for future reference.

[Terry (WGS)]

Ensure that Folder Duplication is switched on for each of your home server's shared folders, and your data will be mirrored on a second physical drive to protect against hardware failure. Windows Home Server handles all of the links to the duplicated files automatically.

[hermy65]

OK, so what happens if i dont duplicate some of the shares, are they still recoverable? Our movie backup folder is almost a TB in itself and my wifes a photographer and the pictures share is close to 2 TB...seems like a lot of not necessarily wasted space if i duplicate them but then i would need more HD's i guess. Also, what happens when a drive goes bad? Does it let me move the data that was on it to another drive even if it wasnt duplicated?

[Drashna Jaelre (WGS)]

If the data is on a drive that fails, and is not duplicated, it is lost. And you may not know immediately what is lost...

If it's important data, I'd highly recommend duplicating it. Do you want to be the one that explains to your wife that there was an option to make sure there was a second copy on another disk, but you didn't enable it because it took twice the disk space? As opposed to explaining that you need to get more disks to make sure her photos don't suffer a tragic fate? Which is why we recommended duplicating *everything* that is important. No such thing as too much redundancy.