Microsoft pulls Windows Home Server backup feature

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. today confirmed that it has yanked parts of a backup feature from a major upgrade to its Windows Home Server software scheduled for release later this year.

Recent posting on several blog sites, including "We Got Served" last week and ZDNet's "All About Microsoft" yesterday, said that the database backup feature of the upcoming Power Pack 1 had been pulled from the update.

The We Got Served blog cited several messages on the Windows Home Server (WHS) support forum from Power Pack 1 beta testers who claimed server-wide backup had been ditched because of difficult-to-solve bugs.

"Power Pack 1 will not provide a tool to back up your backup database," said Ken Warren last Friday in a message posted to the forum. "It was an announced feature, but it has been removed because it doesn't meet the quality bar. I know of at least half-a-dozen bugs submitted around that feature that left end users in a bad place with no obvious way back."

Microsoft announced Power Pack 1 for WHS in January and said it would ship the major upgrade in the first half of 2008. Among the features it touted then was what it called "Windows Home Server Data Backup."

"While adding a hard drive to Windows Home Server, a user is now presented with an option to use the hard drive for backing up the home server," an unidentified member of the WHS team blogged Jan. 6. "Once this option is selected, the home server will appear in the Computers & Backup tab -- where a user can decide what information they want to store on this hard drive.

"You can also back up and restore the entire home computer backup database," read the blog, referring to the data stored by WHS when it backs up individual PCs on the network.

A Microsoft manager used the same support forum to deny claims that all of the backup features scheduled for Power Pack 1 had been stripped. "Backups of the files stored in the Shared Folders is coming in Power Pack 1," said Todd Headricks, a product planning manager on the WSH team. "The various press stories that got posted today are incorrect, misleading and bordering on ...," he said, leaving the ending of the sentence to readers' imaginations.

Later Friday morning, however, Joel Sider, senior product manager for WHS, confirmed that the serverwide backup had been pulled while the Shared Folder backup remained. "Power Pack 1 will provide a new feature: Server backup and restore, meaning customers will be able to offload and protect their pictures, music, documents, etc., that they have in the server's Shared Folders," said Sider in an e-mail forwarded by Microsoft's public relations firm.