I have been running Windows Home Server now for about a week, and I have to say that my satisfaction level is at about 90%. The install went amazingly well, it took about 90 minutes on a Pentium 4 box that I had stuffed with two 500 gig hard drives.
The setup of the Home Server went ok with a couple of exceptions. On several of my home machines they have never needed a password, aka when you boot it up and load Windows XP automatically. It seems Windows Home Server wants the usernames and passwords that reside on the Windows Home Server box to be the same as the XP version and it did not like it that I did not have passwords set on those machines.
The rest of the setup was pretty straight forward but I am still exploring how the file sharing works, it is not as intuitive as I would have expected it to be. The file sharing settings were available on a settings screen that I did not even know existed for the first two days. Microsoft needs to make that menu more prominent.
The backups of all machines connected to my 100mps Switch went fine. One of the machine backups on wireless failed every time, this will be a issue that will have to be mitigated. There is some work that needs to be done, I simply think that the wireless connection can not send the data fast enough to the home server and it may be timing out. The software also does not play well with Norton Firewall
I did some quick math, I have 5 computers that independently have about 900 gigs of data on them. When all of the computers were backed up the total amount of data that was on the home server was about 350 megs. Which tells me it is looking for similar data aka pictures and software that it is only backing up once.
Most of my computers run the same software applications and over time many of the images and documents have migrated across multiple machines not to mention I was using one machine as a backup repository.
The next test is to pull a drive out of a machine and have the Home Server rebuild the drive from scratch and see how well that works. As this is what intrigues me the most about the Windows Home Server