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Been busy lately geeking out at home.  First got my Logitech MX Revolution mouse charging problem fixed.  And now I have been playing around with Ubuntu for a few days, trying to run it on the Acer easyStore h340 Home Server which was running my Windows Home Server.  Why? I have been growing uneasiness about saving my files on the Windows Home Server. Here is what has been happening….

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I have been using Microsoft Money for a long time.  I think the first version of Microsoft Money I started using was version 3.0.  Back in the days, I had a choice of Quicken or Money on the Windows platform.  Since I was buying it to help me manage money, I chose the cheaper of the two.

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I did spare some time to test my Home Server again.  It turns out that it is the drive enclosure that was flaky and causes the Home Server to misbehave.  I had a clue which drive enclosure it could be because out of the 3 drive enclosures still connected to the server, 1 does not have the light on.  After exchanging the drive enclosure with a spare external drive, and connected everything back with the server, everything seems to be normal again.

I still don’t think it is very safe to store my data in external USB drives.  After having numerous problems with this setup, it probably is time to retire this aging hardware and replace it with a newer setup for the sake of my data.  So I actually ordered and picked up the Acer easyStore Windows Home Server from NCIX (a local computer chain store in Canada).

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What do you do to safe guard your digital photos, and all other personal data that you cannot afford to loose?  Do you have a solid storage solution for your personal data that you are confident that it can survive some level of hardware failure?

I have a self-rolled Windows Home Server at home.  It is running on a rather old P4 2.8 system with 2 GBs of RAM.  The motherboard has only 2 SATA connections and 4 PATA connections.  PATA drives are difficult to find these days so when I was upgrading the storage of the server, I often ended up adding SATA drives in external hard drive enclosures.  There was one point in time that I had 8 external drives of varying sizes connected to it. Continue reading