Following on the last post, that reminds me of a WHS bug that folks complained about big time during the beta. For some reason, it didn’t get fixed, and can’t be worked around by the user.
The bug? Windows Media Center Recorded TV is not backed up on PCs. Yes, that means that all your favorite TV shows, recordings, and clips, are not being backed up by Windows Home Server. If your hard drive fails, WHS will not recover these files.
The bug is that WHS was supposed to skip backing up temporary files. Media Center temporary files are listed as one of the things that is automatically excluded from any PC backup. However, the WHS team added the user’s Recorded TV folder to one of the criteria of being a MC Temporary File… and as such, WHS does what it is told… skipping those files.
There’s no way to work around this… you cannot remove MC Temporary Files from being excluded from a PC backup. The only option is to move Recorded TV files to another folder, so that WHS won’t skip them.
Hopefully this will be fixed in the next Windows Home Server update. At the very least, Microsoft should give users the choice here; nobody wants to watch their Recorded TV get vaporized.
Thanks for your very clear comment on this really stupid decision, especially given that recorded TV files are the files that are most likely not being stored on another system. The fact that this “feature” can’t be turned off is really silly.