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I have had only one hard drive corruption with a successful repair, but I traced the majority of the off line occurrences to my Linksys WRT54G Version 5 Wireless Broadband router.  The problem has not occurred since I update the firmware from Version 1.0 about 2 weeks ago.  Sometimes connectivity could be restored through the Home Server Utility and sometimes I had to reset the router itself.  This was initially happening every couple of days.

My question here is, why isn't Microsoft making their OWN software work with their OWN server? Did they never experiment with this in their own labs or something?

I have been experiencing the file corruption issue with MS Money & MS OneNote files.

I had a catastrophic loss of all of my personal financial information for the last number of years, including records of all payments made to vendors on a home remodel project .  This was disconcerting, especially due to the unscrupulous nature of many contractors.  I thought all was lost, but then WHS saved me as I realized I had daily backups of the file from the previous day and before.  (I had just experimented with moving my Documents folder onto WHS, and the MS Money corruption issue hit me the very first day.)

I have also had the file corruption issue with MS OneNote files.  MS OneNotes corruption recovery features helped save much of this data, but I have lost a few notes over time.  I recently moved my OneNote file store/share onto my Media Center server as this machine is also on 24x7.

Over the past year, I've been let down with the quality control on some of the products that MS has released.  I have been using Vista Media Center with digital cable tuner support since the beginning of April (when the first cable card PC's shipped) and have had numerous issues using it with XBox 360 media center extenders.  Only recently (I think the November media center rollup release) have all the issues been resolved.

I have no doubt that MS will fix the file corruption issues (outlined in the KB article), but basic issues such as file system corruption should not be present in a released (gold) version of an operating system.

Do not rule out hardware failure. I was repairing and reformatting my spare WD 180GB drive on several times on multiple computers [XP and Mac OS] and kept getting corrupted files and ultimately drive failures. I finally checked the S.M.A.R.T. status only to see 'failing'. I lost a boat load of old files, hopefully so old that they were backed up or useless. Good luck men. I like when I solve the issues, but hate the frustration.  There's always St. Jude [patron saint of hopeless causes].

I've been running WHS now for almost a month.  I have two desktops and a laptop being backed up daily and everything has been working just fine to-date.  I have two 500GB drives, two 320GB drives and a single 500GB external drive for a total of just over 2TB of storage space.  I duplicate many of my files and so far have not had any problems.  

I have read about these issues and I too am quite concerned since I don't have my data backed up anywhere alse at the moment.  I think I'm going to remove the external 500GB drive for now and use it to keep an extra backup of my critical data until such time as these troubling reports are verified and corrected or prove to be wrong.

I have been experiencing the problems with remote connectivity as mentioned by Paul here. I wasn't sure if this was a problem with my linksys router or whs.

It is very scary to know that files updated by onenote, photo gallery get corrupted. This also brings another scary thought what are the other applications that fall into the category,

Is guess its best not to edit files directly on a WHS file share, i suspect if you edit a file on the share which has duplication then save the file, then go and make a cup of tea - by the time you get back WHS - 'balancing storage' might moved the physical file to another drive  hence problems with the way some applications manage files...

If you have problems with connectivity, then install and run the Windows Home Server Toolkit (forums.microsoft.com/.../ShowPost.aspx\").

If you use any kind of weird DNS service like OpenDNS, then stop using it (make sure to ipconfig /flushdns on the admin command-line).

OpenDNS is buggy and will resolve local network hostnames, including WHS to its own web servers, and cause other IP/Name mismatches.

Pingback from  kyberpaul » Serious Windows Home Server concerns

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Pingback from  ReneRitchie.net   » You Been Served! - Microsoft File Corruption

I'm with DRWAM, don't rule out hardware issues. So often we're used to software failing that we'll pound our head against the wall trying to fix it; when really it's a just a hardware issue.

Pingback from  dan » re: Serious Windows Home Server concerns

Maybe there's a reason why Apple removed the wireless backup via Time machine at the last minute... there must some problem of reliability of wireless transfer via wifi... just a thought even if I'm no expert.

Daniel Escapa mentioned this problem on his OneNote blog as it pertains to OneNote. I will be keeping my OneNote files local for the time being.

http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/

Good luck.

Pingback from  Brandon LeBlanc - A Self-Proclaimed Windows Geek  » Blog Archive   » I share Paul’s Windows Home Server concerns

Pingback from  danfirst » ReneRitchie.net ?? You Been Served! - Microsoft File Corruption

In the non-hacked-up Windows server world, corruption of a similar type is usually due to oplocks. I wonder if it's that simple?

Opportunistic locking is dodgy and should be disabled by default by now, but it's still on in W2K3, Vista and most likely 2008.

Paul,

Have you seen this?

www.windows-now.com/.../possible-data-corruption-with-windows-home-server.aspx

It links to a MS KB article about file corruption on Home Server.

Doh! I didn't remember seeing the link to the KB article in the blog posting before. When I read it on Windows-Now.com, I immediately thought of you and hurriedly posted the link. Sorry for providing info you already know...

Pingback from  kreative_96 » danfirst ?? ReneRitchie.net ?? You Been Served! - Microsoft File …

I saw the hard drive corruption issue quite a bit (probably once a week I had a volume that failed) while I was running the Eval version, but since I reinstalled after I purchased a copy, I have not seen that problem.

I have also experienced file corruption with Quicken and QuickBooks. I had to move the data directories to local storage and just make backups to WHS. Even doing that, sometimes it corrupts the QuickBooks files (or at least it complains it can't duplicate them).

The other problem I have seen is that even saving standard office files directly to the shared drive is extremely slow. Way slower than to my other W2k3 box, so I know it's not a networking issue. I wonder if this is what causes the file corruption issues.

My guess is it has something to do with the way WHS is providing transparent access to multiple drives making them appear as one. There has to be some layer that was implemented to achieve this, and most likely this is the culprit.

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Pingback from  dan » kreative_96 ?? danfirst ?? ReneRitchie.net ?? You Been Served …

It's interesting to note that the programs listed in the KB article use structured data files.  Possible the fact that the files are open when the application is open and WHS is trying to balance data is causing the data corruption.

Gives one to think about the testing procedures used @ MS. Ah well, back to FreeNAS then ..

Just a quick thanks for all the comments here. Hopefully, we'll hear something positive from MS soon. I will try to ping the WHS guys this week, but given the timing, it's unclear if anyone will be around.

This may be what we all use at home in a few years. Who knows, maybe the WHserver will handle Macs and Linux too! I think that it is a real possibility, I just wanted to write it first here.

Wow. This is awesome.

I was actually looking into WHS for the home network.

Think I'll stick with my original plan of a Unix box instead.

Excuse for the total Noob question but what does a WHS box offer more than a good NAS like the excellent Buffalo LinkstationPro ??

If this helps, I found this :

Microsoft's Windows Home Server corrupts files

'Don't edit' list includes photos, as well as Quicken and QuickBooks files, warns Microsoft; no word on patch

here is the link:

www.computerworld.com/.../article.do

Add to this the fact that HP seems to have disabled the Shadow Copy feature on their MediaSmart servers. Found this out the hard way after accidentally deleting some files from a WHS share. Maybe Paul can ask his contacts at HP what's up with this...