Philip Churchill’s WHS blog posted an important note about Windows Home Server: be careful when you chose to reboot it.

Most people will never manually reboot their Windows Home Server. However, a lot of tech-savvy people chose to tinker around, expand what their home server can do, and use it like a traditional Window Server. Not that that’s a bad thing… it’s one of the target markets for Windows Home Server. I personally run many extra applications on my WHS box, from World Community Grid, to HoTTProxy, and countless designed-for-WHS add-ins.

Unfortunately, manually rebooting WHS can create a database inconsistency, if WHS is in the middle of balancing storage. It appears that services like Windows Update contain special code to halt storage balancing and WHS database functions, but not when a user manually triggers a system reboot. Likewise, power interruptions can also cause database inconsistencies. A database inconsistency can be fatal to WHS, you can have data on two hard drives in the box, but that won’t do any good if it’s not logged in the database.

I personally think this is a bug, but not a big deal. Usually an inconsistency results in the files still being logged in the main drive, but not on the shadow copy. But, I could see it being a problem if a PC backup had an inconsistency… since they are incremental, there’s no second copy, nor any additional redundancy.

The best way you can secure yourself against this, is to check the WHS Console first, to make sure it isn’t doing anything (backing up a PC, balancing storage, cleaning up, etc), before rebooting the system. Also, add an uninterruptable power supply with Windows notification, so that the server can shut down gracefully in a power failure.

Oh, and have a backup of all the files on your Home Server. I personally use Mozy on my PCs, so to back up the Home Server, I have a spare hard drive in one of my PCs that backs up the shared storage. That drive has been nixed from the WHS backup, but all the files on the WHS are mirrored to that drive, and then uploaded to Mozy for no additonal charge. Sure beats paying Mozy’s killer server rate for data backups.

Mozy still hasn’t gotten things clear on Windows Home Server, I keep getting conflicting replies from them. One says they’ll have a hybrid offering, and the next says you’ll have to pay their corporate per-GB rate… Hopefully they’ll realize people are just going to work around the pricing structure, in the manner I outlined above