Windows 10: Setting up a Windows10 Pro PC as a server?

I currently have a WHS2011 server which has given me many years of excellent, trouble free service. The server has been used as a media server, file server, download server and a backup server but now is only used for PC backups and file server duties. I love how easy it is to setup users, shares and backups and if it wasn't for the fact WHS2011 is no longer supported I would keep it for many more years but the lack of updates, particularly security updates, is concerning. So my thoughts are to use Windows 10 Pro, Stablebit Drivepool, Stablebit Scanner and Lights-Out (i am already using the software on my existing server) to provide drive pooling, HDD health checking and server management but what can I use to do automated PC and server backups? I like the way WHS2011 backup enables me to do a bare metal restore so that is something I wish to continue to have available. Thanks

:)

 

Setting up a Windows10 Pro PC as a server?

Hi there.

@Davidt99

For a Server I'd (but of course I am biased) go for any sensible Linux distro. The great thing about any sort of Linux distro to be used as a server is that you can use really old hardware if you need to, networking always works straight out of the box - even on wifi these days (that used to be a bugbear), you can run the server totally headless (although you can install any GUI you want as well) , it's a multi-user system so you don't need to be logged on at all to have the server running 24/7, you can aggregate loads of old HDD's of different sizes to software RAID 0 configuration - you don't need equal size HDD's so you can use the whole storage of your HDD's, and streaming multimedia works perfectly. File share via SAMBA .
No prob with windows read / write of ntfs file system either.

In fact there's so many advantages in using a Linux box as a NAS I'm surprised people are still messing around with Windows for this type of thing (Home computers -- of course W2K16 and W2K19 commercial Windows servers are fine too but they aren't normally in the price range for people who just want Home Networks whereas Linux is 100% free !!.

I host a load of Windows VM's on it too .

Here's my HDD config on a NAS box (running Arch Linux with KDE as the GUI)





Other benefits -- automatic backups (rsync / grsync scheduled when you want via crontab), you can add software at will - and also you can remotely access and control from say a Windows laptop via SSH.

If you don't have Linux experience then why not create a Virtual machine to get used to it - there's a load of good distros for beginners -- some of them are even "More Windows than Windows" !!!!. With a VM if things go wrong just delete the VM and start again - no dmage done or data lost on your main Host.

Here's a recent W10 build running as a Virtual machine on this NAS.





(I'm using QEMU/KVM but Virtual box and Vmware player - both free can be used to set up Virtual machines on a Linux system -- and Virtual Box / Vmware player also work on Windows. If you have W10 pro you could try HYPER-V as well but I'd advise against setting up Linux VM's with HYPER-V until you have a bit more experience with Linux systems).

Even with NAS systems you need to backup from time to time

I recommend the free Linux program rsync with it's GUI grsync

Easy to use, can run via crontab at your selected times, backs up to external drives as required.

I backup windows OS for each client via Macrium on to a windows HDD, then windows user data files and the image(s) I then backup to the NAS and stage 2 NAS changed / new files i backup to external storage.

Grsysnc : (loads of options -- the default one backs up changed and new data).





If you are worried about data recovery if the NAS fails - then you can boot any old Linux live distro to access the HDD's and Windows will be able to access once you start SAMBA on the live distro - or (I wouldn't recommend this but the external device you use for the NAS's backup could be formatted NTFS -- backup would run slower though and it's not really necessary).

Note for the Linux OS keep it small - same advice I'd give for the Windows OS too then back up the NAS LINUX OS to an external device via dd if=<input os device> of=<output os device> bs=2048M status=progress.

Then if you need bare metal restore of your NAS OS boot a live distro , attach the device you created as output device and run the dd command to copy back to the NAS's OS HDD. No need to format anything). You probably won't need to backup the NAS OS regularly if you don't make changes to it - if you use something like UBUNTU LTS then updates to the Linux OS will be quite rare and you can ignore most of them until a new release. As far as security is concerned pretty well all Linux systems are fine these days.


Cheers
jimbo

 

Setting up a Windows10 Pro PC as a server?

I currently have a WHS2011 server which has given me many years of excellent, trouble free service. The server has been used as a media server, file server, download server and a backup server but now is only used for PC backups and file server duties. I love how easy it is to setup users, shares and backups and if it wasn't for the fact WHS2011 is no longer supported I would keep it for many more years but the lack of updates, particularly security updates, is concerning. So my thoughts are to use Windows 10 Pro, Stablebit Drivepool, Stablebit Scanner and Lights-Out (i am already using the software on my existing server) to provide drive pooling, HDD health checking and server management but what can I use to do automated PC and server backups? I like the way WHS2011 backup enables me to do a bare metal restore so that is something I wish to continue to have available.

Thanks

 

Noob at LAN set-up.

Fixed it... Reworked the network as suggested and used XP Pro now, before they were only using XP home... Set up client monitoring for server pc so that when the time expires the client pcs automatically locks.