Those who went through high school with a basic computer course were often told to “save early, save often” by their instructors. Of course, gone are the days when floppy disks held our important documents, though even to this day that piece of advice holds true. As computers have evolved to be a central hub of information, entertainment, and personal information, retaining and protecting those digital bits of information is becoming increasingly important. Computers are NOT infallible machines, and with one crash of a hard drive, everything on your computer can be lost forever. We’re not just talking about old essays and e-mails; digital photos, tax returns, financial statements, home videos, and other irreplaceable files could be gone in an instant. You may save early and often, but the more relevant advice you’ve heard over and over again, “Backup, backup, backup,” is sadly often overlooked.

Times have changed in other ways, too; it’s not a one computer per family environment anymore. More and more families are adopting dedicated computers for different people or tasks. It’s not uncommon now for little Jimmy and Mom to each have their own laptops, Dad to have a work PC in the office, and the home theater to have a Media center PC for showing videos and photos to friends and family.

I may be the extreme example of the multi-computer home. Between my wife and I, we use 6 different computers around the house (one PC each in our downstairs office, one individual laptop each, one dedicated “always on” laptop in the kitchen, and one Media Center PC hooked up to our home theater.) Suffice it to say, the thought of keeping them regularly backed up is daunting, and far too often have we had to hunt through different computers to figure out where the vacation photos were. With more and more PCs, finding something like a photo quickly becomes more like “finding a needle in a haystack.”

With several computers scattered throughout the home, the growing need for a centralized computing device has arrived. That device I’m talking about is a server, but not just any random, complicated server you'd find in a corporate office (an environment where data storage, sharing, and protection is an art form in itself.) I’m talking about a new type of server… a home server. Simple, easy, and efficient… and that’s where we start talking about HP’s MediaSmart Server.

Simplifying Backups for Multi-Computer Families

Whether you have one computer or seven, you can’t argue with the simplicity of the MediaSmart Server. It’s the dream device of the digital home, allowing you to backup data, centralize photos, music, and videos, stream media to connected devices around the home, and share your memories with family around the globe. Most importantly, it integrates smoothly in your existing setup, and is pretty easy to understand and operate. In fact, the MediaSmart Server doesn’t need a keyboard, monitor, or mouse to operate, letting you store it anywhere, so long as you can connect it to your network. All administration of the Home Server is done remotely from another PC.

HP’s MediaSmart Server is the first dedicated home server device in the US running Microsoft’s Home Server operating system. By starting with their powerful Windows Server platform and streamlining it for the home, Microsoft has put together a powerful system that’s easy to operate and administer. Since it’s from Microsoft, the integration between the Home Server and Windows XP and Vista computers is seamless. With a quick installation of the Home Server Connector software on your various computers, things like automatic backup scheduling make what was once a complicated chore, seem simple. Best of all, automatic backups are complete images of your hard drive, which means you can even use the special HP Restore disc to completely restore a computer in the event of a hard drive crash.

Centralized Media and Entertainment

Out of the box, the HP MediaSmart Server is geared for the digitally connected home by offering three separate shared folders for music, video, and photos. Using Microsoft’s Windows Media Connect technology, files in these folders are accessible from any computer or other compatible device on the network, like the XBOX 360. No longer do you have to offload photos to a USB drive to share them with your family; simply drop them into the photos folder and they’ll become available to any user on your network. The same is true for music, which HP has taken a step further by adding their own iTunes Music Manager, which aggregates the music libraries from connected computers and makes the content playable on any machine.

Fast, Storage Efficient Backups and Room to Grow

Efficiency is also important. With your average family member consuming gigabytes and gigabytes of data, running out of space to store all this data is a real problem. HP’s MediaSmart Server has you covered in two different ways:

First, the HP MediaSmart Server hardware itself is set up for growth. Depending on whether you pick up the 500GB or 1TB model, you’ll have either two or three open bays to add additional space to your server. Microsoft’s Home Server OS integrates new drives into one large pool of data, so you won’t have to worry about which drive has what. Aside from the open bays, you also have the flexibility of integrating external USB or eSATA hard drives to the mix, which makes your upgrade options almost limitless.

Second, the way data is stored on the MediaSmart Server is different from your typical network attached storage device. To keep it simple, I’ll explain using an example. Let’s say you were to completely backup four brand new computers loaded with Windows Vista and Office. Combined, the OS and Office take up twenty Gigabytes of space (again, this is only an example with easy numbers). By the time you were done, you’d expect to take up eighty Gigabytes of space on your storage device. However, the MediaSmart Server uses intelligent data storage techniques so it only has to store identical files once.

How is this done? The actual data on many computers is often identical, like in the case of an operating system, so only one copy of the actual file is saved on the server and linked to each computer that has it. In a multi-computer environment, storing every like file from the OS and other similar programs (iTunes, anti-virus software, games, photo editing software, etc.) would take up an enormous amount of space. This great technology works with any type of data, so if your computer has the same MP3 audio file as another, only one copy really needs to be saved.

The actual process of backing up your data is just as smart. It doesn’t need to send your entire hard drive to the server every night (which if you have a lot of data, would take forever.) Instead, after the first initial backup, it scans your computer for only the things that have changed and backs up those items only, making it take a fraction of the time. You can even open any backup from a specific period to retrieve a file you may have accidentally changed or deleted.

Remote Access for 'Remote' Relatives

Another of HP’s innovations for the MediaSmart Server is its photo sharing software. After a little bit of extra configuration and setup, you can make your MediaSmart Server accessible remotely to your friends and family to view photos. The system is secure, and open only to those for whom you have set up guest accounts. They can log in, view and save photos, and (if you specify) even upload photos of their own to your server. That last ability is a great way to get photos taken by Aunt Laura or Uncle Tom.

Endless Discovery

I could probably go on and on about the other great things Home Server can do, and while I’ve covered what I believe to be the most important, there’s a lot more to discover. Over time, I hope to share many of my insights, discoveries, and tips with you, as well as the things I've learned to love about my Home Server and what I may not like so much.

Get involved in the MediaSmart Home Community, and discover for yourself the things an HP MediaSmart Server can do for your digitally connected family.