Microsoft narrows scope of Home Server bug

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. product managers on Friday claimed that a data-corruption bug in Windows Home Server crops up only when the system is under an "extreme load," but they also defended their decision to sound a general alarm before they had completed their investigation.

The news that Windows Home Server (WHS) could corrupt files raised a storm of criticism from customers and observers alike.

"The problem isn't 100% reproducible and depends on quite a few different factors," explained Todd Headrick, the product planning manager on the Windows Home Server (WHS) team. "Home Server has to be under an extreme load while doing a large file copy," he said, adding that the flaw comes into play only in instances when the file server's cache is full and the user is editing a file previously saved to a shared folder.

"But we thought it was important enough to generalize [the bug] so people would take it seriously, even though we took a [public relations] hit," Headrick added.

On Wednesday, Microsoft warned users in a tightly worded support document not to edit files stored on their servers with certain programs. "Files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server," the company said in advisory KB946676, which it published last week to its support site.

Saying that the bug was in the shared folders feature of WHS, the document urged users to stop using seven Microsoft applications, including Windows Vista Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, OneNote 2003, OneNote 2007, Outlook 2007, Microsoft Money 2007 and SyncToy 2.0 Beta under some conditions. "We recommend that do not use the programs to save or to edit program-specific files that are stored on a Windows Home Server-based system," the document read.

That wide-ranging recommendation caught the attention of WHS users and Microsoft critics alike. Some sounded white-hot.

"I've had a fair share of files corrupted," a user identified as "Shane K" claimed on the WHS support forum. "I have 800+ gigs of data on my home server, and I've had just about every file type you can imagine refuse to open or at sometime go to 0KB file size for no reason. This issue has been around for MONTHS, so I don't know why suddenly the WHS team decides to 'work through the holidays' to resolve it when there has been plenty of action on the boards since beta about this issue."

Others misunderstood Microsoft's warning and assumed that client backups to WHS would end up corrupted, which wasn't true. "This could potentially be the 'my dog ate my homework' for the 21st century," said a user named "BVis" on a Slashdot.org thread that tracked Computerworld's original story. "'I did my homework, but the power went out before I could save it, and my backups were all corrupt!'"