I've been using Windows Home Server for just over 6 months now. I know this because the trial expired and I had to upgrade to the full version. This did not involve entering a product key - it was an install over the top - which took over an hour.
This always worries me, since it was working 100% before the "upgrade" would it work after.
The upgrade went smoothly. It restarted a few times and then was ready to go, without any network. Home Server does not detect my network card, so I had to go and find the right drivers from another machine, download and copy to the server. This took around 20 minutes to find and install the network drivers (they were on the C drive of the Home Server, which was upgraded!)
Next, I had to re-create my user accounts - not so smooth - I had to reassign permissions to shares. This took around 10 minutes.
Next, I needed to reinstall the client connector software on each computer to have them connect back up. This was very annoying and took around 30 minutes.
So with the install time at about an hour - plus an hour to mess on - I'm now back to where I was 2 hours ago...
So now we are back up and running and everything should be fine right? Wrong. after a few days I notice that backups are not being done. It appears, after much searching, that the only way to correct my particular problem was to reset the backup database (read that as delete it). Now I'm feeling pain. I did have some machines in the backup that have been since "migrated" to newer OS's. The backup served as a safety net just in case something was not backed up. Loosing those was very painful, but not as much as not having a backup working in the house - more trade-offs. In my opinion, this is the exact opposite of the experience I should have had with Home Server. I see it very much as an appliance, and not something I want to play admin on (I have real servers for that)
Now the big test, my new 320gb drive arrives for my machine. I want this as my boot drive in place of my 110gb drive. Easiest way to do this would appear to be a restore from the backup on home server. In goes the drive, out comes the restore CD, it boots - I select the machine I want to restore from and 2 hours later - bingo - everything is as it should be, except I now have 200gb free. Wonderful, and pain free. This is exactly how it should work.
Whilst my drive swapped worked great, moving from the trial version to the final was not a good experience - why is it not possible just to enter a valid product key?
I still have mixed feelings about Home Server, given the data corruption bug, but I'm looking forward to the Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 - which should fix that bug, and maybe allow me to run 64bit Vista - although I see the server backup has gone...
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