Indeed, it dropped the major feature of the WHS Drive Extender, much to the dismay of WHS customers. WHS 2011 was not a straightforward improvement over the original WHS. I bought an OEM license for WHS in November 2007, and have been running WHS ever since first the original version of WHS, and then WHS 2011, which was released in April 2011. The Windows Home Server Drive Extender: reliable, secure storage with a single namespace, that was transparently extendible.Automatic backup of PCs that was both extremely efficient in terms of storage space needed (“ Single-instance storage”), and which offered the “Time Machine” feature of being able to restore previous versions of files, or the whole PC, if required.Despite being aimed at home users, remote access to your computers from outside the home wouldn’t work if you had home versions of Windows installed on your computers.Īpart from that castration by Management, WHS still had some very clever and innovative technology under the hood: Technically, it was pretty solid, but of course, Microsoft Management had got involved, and one of the potentially unique selling points had been removed. There were some issues that I found, but by the time of release, the majority had been resolved. I, along with thousands of others, had been testing the software at home prior to release. The first version of WHS was released to manufacturing in July 2007.

His idea went through more iterations until in February 2004, work began on a project called “Quattro” and that resulted in a product group to be formed in 2005 to produce what was to become Windows Home Server. A long time ago, way back in 1999, a man by the name of Charlie Kindel had an idea: Microsoft was developing Windows for home PCs, why shouldn’t it develop Windows for a home server as well? His managers initially told him to focus on his real job, but his idea surfaced at CES in 2000 as a technology prototype called “Bedrock” focused on home automation and family applications.

Windows home server 2011 recovery