I was at Wal-Mart the other day waiting to pay for my allergy medicine and some powdered donuts when low and behold the customer in front of me decided to pay $100.08 when the sale was for 95.08 no problem right? Well the teller accidentally entered $100.00 as the amount received in the register.. whoops. Well the problem was not in the fact that the drawer would be off by $.08 it was that she now had to calculate what she owed the customer we sat there for approximately 5 minutes while the teller determined that 100.08 - 95.08 = $5.00 change for the customer. This scenario highlighted a problem, we are more dependent on computers to handle our daily tasks then ever before and I would even wager to say that they are the single most essential item for functioning in our daily lives. Its ever eye opening to me in the computer profession to see mission critical computers operating with little or no backup, redundancy or virus and spyware protection, this is where servers come in to play.
Fact: It is generally accepted advice in our industry that if you have a home or business with 3 or more computers it is recommended that you have a server in place.
Protect yourself with a Server and sleep better at night knowing that you are not playing Russian roulette with your data. For those of you who thought that Servers were only for big business times have changed and servers are much more affordable. There is a lesser known operating system from Microsoft called Windows Home Server and it is an affordable alternative to Windows Server 2008. You can read more about windows home server here. All you need for a server is redundant hard drives in a Raid 1 or 5 array. Without going into too much detail a RAID array is when multiple hard drives are used in conjunction for redundancy or speed purposes. Naturally in a server the RAID array would be used primarily for redundancy. Second you would need an automated backup system. An automated backup system is necessary even if RAID is in place because if a file is corrupted and needs to be reverted back then you would have to restore from a backup file as a RAID array only stores current real time data.
A server offers the following commonly sought after benefits: redundancy, backup, file and print sharing, and remote access (being able to work from home or access your home computer while on the road). While a server can offer many additional features such as a web server or mail server I will forgo the urge to delve too far into that realm for this article as we are focused on small business/home use.
Any additional server questions please post a comment and I would be happy to have further discussion.