Microsoft Windows Home Server

[Michael]

At CES, Microsoft has launched it's Windows Home Server product.

What is it?

There?s a lot in here, so here?s the main stuff up front: A Windows Home Server is a simple box that lies at the center of your home network. The Server works without interaction (it doesn?t run programs like typical operatings systems, doesn?t even have a monitor port), simplifying some very complex tasks among all the computers in your home.

Home Server is where your family will store all of its important files. All music, video, photos, documents and even some software will sit on the Home Server, and all the computers in the home will be able to access it over your network (wired or wireless) as if they were on the computers themselves. You will even be able to access your files over the internet (don?t worry, everything is protected), and the killer feature: Home Server streams to the Xbox 360 and other Media Center Extenders.

Home Server also keeps your computers protected from disaster, by backing up every byte of data on every computer in the home. It can take an unlimited amount of storage space, backing up to internal and external hard drives the entire contents of every PC, not once, but twice, letting you restore files or entire PCs immediately. It even stores versions of files, so you can roll back that important spreadsheet to how it looked two weeks ago, or undo four days of awful video editing by your talentless sibling.

Wasn't Apple implementing some sort of feature like this in the new Mac OS X where it would back-up real-time to external media and you could restore to any point in history?

http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/?p=2450

It basically sounds like a network attached storage drive with a bunch of features for those that have no idea how to backup data...

Anyone else have any thoughts on this product?