Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

Ready for your head to explode? This works with Windows Server 2012 as well.

This is true regardless of how many of the configured disks you attach, and it has amazing repercussions for those who need to blow away a PC configuration but retain all the data. By putting your valuable data in spaces, you can be sure it’s all immediately available after the fact when you reinstall Windows 8 or simply buy a new PC.

Amazing.

We probably shouldn’t be putting this idea in your head, but it’s even more amazing than we suggest. You could actually change the configuration of the space on the second PC—say by adding a new disk—and when you go back to using the space with the first PC, that configuration will carry back as well.

There are two final, extreme Storage Spaces configurations, both of which involve using three disks with either mirroring or parity. In a three-way mirrored configuration, Storage Spaces works just like two-way mirroring, except, of course, that your data is replicated on three physical disks. With parity, again, additional redundancy information is written to each disk, which could help with recovery in the event of a hard drive failure.

Creating either configuration works much as before, however, this time you will need three additional disks. After selecting each in the Create a Storage Pool window, you’ll be presented with the screen in which you provide a name, drive letter, resiliency type, and logical size for the first space in the pool, as shown in Figure 11-11.

Figure 11-11:This time, the Storage Spaces configuration uses three drives.

In a three-way mirror, the total storage pool capacity is of the total capacity of the three drives added together, so in this example, with two 3 TB disks and one 512 GB disk, it’s roughly 6 TB. But a parity configuration, shown in Figure 11-12, is a bit different.

Here, the total storage pool capacity is again roughly 6 TB, but the maximum pool capacity usage is different than that of a three-way mirror configuration because of the way parity works.

Figure 11-12:Using parity eats up a bit more space but is more resilient.

Earlier, this chapter described the situation where you remove a disk from a storage space and then later plug it in again, repairing the space and bringing everything back to normal. That’s nice when it happens. But what if a disk goes bad?

Just as you can easily remove disks from a space as noted previously in this chapter, you can also add new disks. But since disks are added to pools, not to spaces, you’ll need to remove the old, potentially damaged disk first. And then the space will simply claim storage on another disk in the pool for its own. Here’s how it works.

Suppose you have a pool that consists of one space, called Space (we know, inventive), that’s been configured as a two-way mirror with a logical size of 20 TB, and two physical disks, each of which are 3 TB. Over time, the space fills up with content—perhaps you’ve been busy ripping your DVD collection to the PC in anticipation of an optical disc-less future—and you’re getting close to the 3 TB physical space limit. And then disaster strikes: One of the disks goes down for the count, so your content is no longer being replicated.

When this type of thing happens, Action Center will trigger a notification like the one shown in Figure 11-13. Click it and you will navigate immediately to Storage Spaces so you can fix the issue.

Figure 11-13:An Action Center warning about low disk capacity in your storage space

In the Storage Spaces control panel, you will see warnings next to the space itself as well as the injured disk. If you attempt to remove the bad disk, you may see an error message related to data that has to be reallocated. Instead, click the Add drives link, select the disk or disks you’d like to add to the pool, and then Storage Spaces will do the rest. Eventually, you’ll be able to remove that bad disk from the control panel and get back to work.

Note that this would also work if you wanted to replace existing disks with larger capacity disks. So when those 4, 5, or 6 TB hard drives come to market, you’ll be ready.

Windows 7 included a decent but well-hidden feature called Previous Versions that allowed you to recover an older version of a document or other data file, perhaps because you made an editing error and then inadvertently saved over the correct version. Previous Versions was a first stab at creating a front end for a service called Volume Shadow Copy that debuted in Windows Server 2003. And it was fine if you knew it was there. But most users didn’t. That’s because you had to right-click on the document, choose Properties, navigate to the Previous Versions tab, and hope that the appropriate previous version of the file was there.

In Windows 8, Previous Versions has been replaced by a vastly superior feature called File History. This feature works much like Previous Versions did, and utilizes updated versions of the same back-end technologies. But there are three major differences between Previous Versions and File History. First, File History isn’t enabled by default, so you’ll need to turn it on. Second, File History uses a lot less disk space to perform its backups, thanks to new compression technologies in Windows 8 and its ability to cache backups on your system disk. And third, File History is about a million times easier to use than Previous Versions. OK, we exaggerate. Maybe it’s just a thousand times easier.

Not impressed? Well, if you create your own libraries, file versions in those locations will be backed up too, and automatically. Come on, that’s downright impressive.

By default, File History automatically backs up everything in your libraries, on your desktop, in your Favorites, and in Contacts. That’s a lot more stuff than it perhaps sounds like; remember that your libraries consist of eight locations by default: My Documents, Public Documents, My Music, Public Music, My Pictures, Public Pictures, My Videos, and Public Videos.

You can also configure File History to automatically back up other locations of your choice or, to not back up certain locations too. If you have a home network with a home server, a network attached storage (NAS) device, or a PC with lots of storage, you can even configure File History to work across the network, and then automatically recommend that location to others on the homegroup, creating a central location for all file backups.

Chapter 13discusses homegroups, which is a networking feature that makes home-based sharing easier than ever.

To better understand File History, let’s see it in action.

File History, like Storage Spaces, is implemented as a classic control panel. So the fastest way to access its configuration interface is to use Start Search. Or, display Control Panel via the new power user menu (mouse into the lower-left corner of the screen, right-click, and select Control Panel) and then search for File History using the preselected search box.