Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: eagl on August 10, 2013, 02:00:04 AM
-
I thought I'd share my WHS migration results.
I think it has been successful. The worst part was getting the database from the old system to the new one, but once it was transferred over the new WHS installation loaded it up and all the backups were there, including all the data about where they came from (8 different computers, 3 of which do not exist anymore).
Lessons learned:
1. If possible, using an internal hard drive connection to copy the database would have been more hands-on work but a lot faster in the long run. Copying the database to the new HD over USB took 6 days, and copying it from the HD to the new computer over USB took 6 hours. If I'd been able to do it on an internal drive connection, it would have taken just an hour or two each way.
2. It's fairly easy to transfer the backup. Just shut down 2 services, copy the database, turn on 2 services. I rebooted, just for good measure. Then re-install the WHS client on each home computer. Super easy, and the new server even correctly remembered which client computer was which, so I won't end up with a lot of duplicated data.
3. Don't ever ever ever forget to install NVidia drivers for NVidia chipset computers BEFORE you let the computer connect to the internet for the first time. Because...
4. Don't ever ever ever let windows validate the license until AFTER all chipset drivers are installed AND UPDATED. If you do so, the license validation routine will see all the device and driver IDs change a few times and invalidate the license, requiring a call to Microsoft to unlock the license. They didn't even ask why I needed to unlock it, probably because this was a 2003 OS and they just don't care about it anymore, but I still had to spend 15 minutes on the phone doing it.
All in all, it was pretty darn easy. I'm adding the transfer HD to the server drive pool, so I'll have nearly 3GB of backup space available. You can tell WHS to duplicate shared folder data across all installed drives (you can't duplicate the backup data but you can duplicate shared files), so anything I really care about like family photos and my music library which would be hard to rebuild can be dropped into the WHS user shares, and then duplicated across the 2 installed drives. That way if one fails, while it will partially nuke the backup data, it won't take out whatever was in the user shares.
Last, the new computer was able to push across a file at 40-50% utilization of a gigabit Ethernet connection. I can live with 400Mb/s, much better than the 10Mb/s or so I was getting before.
-
I thought I'd share my WHS migration results.
I think it has been successful. The worst part was getting the database from the old system to the new one, but once it was transferred over the new WHS installation loaded it up and all the backups were there, including all the data about where they came from (8 different computers, 3 of which do not exist anymore).
Lessons learned:
1. If possible, using an internal hard drive connection to copy the database would have been more hands-on work but a lot faster in the long run. Copying the database to the new HD over USB took 6 days, and copying it from the HD to the new computer over USB took 6 hours. If I'd been able to do it on an internal drive connection, it would have taken just an hour or two each way.
2. It's fairly easy to transfer the backup. Just shut down 2 services, copy the database, turn on 2 services. I rebooted, just for good measure. Then re-install the WHS client on each home computer. Super easy, and the new server even correctly remembered which client computer was which, so I won't end up with a lot of duplicated data.
3. Don't ever ever ever forget to install NVidia drivers for NVidia chipset computers BEFORE you let the computer connect to the internet for the first time. Because...
4. Don't ever ever ever let windows validate the license until AFTER all chipset drivers are installed AND UPDATED. If you do so, the license validation routine will see all the device and driver IDs change a few times and invalidate the license, requiring a call to Microsoft to unlock the license. They didn't even ask why I needed to unlock it, probably because this was a 2003 OS and they just don't care about it anymore, but I still had to spend 15 minutes on the phone doing it.
All in all, it was pretty darn easy. I'm adding the transfer HD to the server drive pool, so I'll have nearly 3GB of backup space available. You can tell WHS to duplicate shared folder data across all installed drives (you can't duplicate the backup data but you can duplicate shared files), so anything I really care about like family photos and my music library which would be hard to rebuild can be dropped into the WHS user shares, and then duplicated across the 2 installed drives. That way if one fails, while it will partially nuke the backup data, it won't take out whatever was in the user shares.
Last, the new computer was able to push across a file at 40-50% utilization of a gigabit Ethernet connection. I can live with 400Mb/s, much better than the 10Mb/s or so I was getting before.
Heh, that license hassle alone would be reason enough for me to dump the WHS.
-
15 minutes on the phone was a lot simpler than an hour convincing a Linux installation to play nice with the NVidia chipset mobo.
It's worked just fine since the installation, and I've already added the 2TB drive to the pool. Because of the drive duplication feature for shares, I'm putting a copy of my music library and digital photos on the WHS shares. Those ought to remain readable even one of the 2 WHS drives fail.
-
15 minutes on the phone was a lot simpler than an hour convincing a Linux installation to play nice with the NVidia chipset mobo.
It's worked just fine since the installation, and I've already added the 2TB drive to the pool. Because of the drive duplication feature for shares, I'm putting a copy of my music library and digital photos on the WHS shares. Those ought to remain readable even one of the 2 WHS drives fail.
Funny you should say that because Nvidia is the easyest possible platform to build linux on currently.