News

posted on 22 February 2008 18:27

Microsoft's Windows Home Server is still liable to corrupt data two months after the problem was first noted by Microsoft.

Its a consumer storage product costing about $600 for hardware and $189 for software which can act as a storage servers for multiple PCs.

When users try to access and save files they can find data has been corrupted.

Microsoft states that it has successfully reproduced corruptions for the following nine programs:-

• Windows Vista Photo Gallery
• Windows Live Photo Gallery
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2003
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
• Microsoft Money 2007
• SyncToy 2.0 Beta
• Intuit QuickBooks
• uTorrent

The following programs have been reported by customers as also having caused corruptions. However, Microsoft has not yet been able to reproduce corruptions:-

• Photoshop Elements
• Zune Software
• Apple iTunes
• TagScanner
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Adobe Lightroom
• Intuit Quicken
• MS Digital Image Library
• MP3BookHelper
• ACDSee
• WinAmp
• Windows Media Player 11
• Microsoft Office Excel
• Visual DataFlex

The support note goes on to say: "Until an update for Windows Home Server is available, we recommend that you do not use the programs that are listed in the "Symptoms" section to save or to edit program-specific files that are stored on a Windows Home Server-based system. This issue only affects Windows Home Server systems that have more than one hard disk drive added to the server storage."

This is, quite frankly, disasterous. It's also alarming. What on earth has Microsoft done to what should be a simple CIFS network-attached storage (NAS) product?

Microsoft tries to reassure users: "Before you store files on a system that is running Windows Home Server, make sure that you have a backup copy of any important program files. You can still use the Windows Home Server home computer backup process to back up and to restore files on your home computers. The Windows Home Server home computer backup service is not affected by this issue."

Hmm. For me I would simply stop using the product altogether. There's a basic 'can I trust it with my data at all' issue here.