Windows Anytime Upgrade

Really? Anytime? Yup. And from OEM to Retail too.

My new PC runs Windows 7 Home Premium and I've already installed all of my apps. But I heard somewhere that it was ridiculously easy to upgrade editions under 7.

Problem was, I got a lot of noisy search results trying to bring up some info on how to do this (and lots of hits on cracking and piracy). There's lots of info out there describing the feature and roughly what's involved, but I was missing the critical first step of HOW to do it. Maybe I wasn't reading closely enough...I do that from time to time (my cowboy hat gets in the way so to speak).

I did find an article once from TechRepublic (I think) that described the process as being as simple as punching in your code for Pro (or Ultimate), or whatever. But for the life of me I couldn't find it again (and I couldn't even remember which of my computers I found it on to go digging through the IE history).

So, after looking at this for a few minutes and giving up (and repeating the process a few time), I gave my thinking a reboot this morning and did the following:

1. Clicked the Start button.

2. Typed "windows anytime upgrade" into the search field.

3. Low and behold, a wizard appeared.

4. Typed in my Windows 7 Ultimate key (which was free from a Microsoft Event).

5. Verifying.

6. Click "I Accept".

7. Click "Upgrade". WARNING: Your computer will restart automatically.

8. Done.

Windows XP Mode, here I come. I wonder how long it will take for my WHS to recognize the change (it's busy shuffling disks right now so I can't check).

Backing Up Windows Home Server

So, I haven't really been paying attention. NTBackup does not work for backing up a WHS. I mean, we've got it backing up our PCs, and that's fine. But what about the server? Vlad Mazek talked about this a bit on his blog a while back. I've already got the remote critical data backups covered, but as I mentioned before, I'm lazy and I don't want to rebuild everything from scratch if my WHS dies. Would ShadowProtect or some other image based software help us here? Its a solid maybe - WHS makes use of logical volumes and the bastard step-child of software mirroring. Maybe it wouldn't matter if you restored the entire image to one large drive. I might need to try that.

Anyway here's how I discovered this - I was futzing with the WHS web server files today as I migrated my websites from a virtualized Linux box over to IIS on the home server. I modified a silly .html file, saved too quickly, and then decided I wanted the original back. So I went to grab an old version out of my latest NTbackup. As I attempted to index the .bkf file and restore the document I wanted, I'm greeted by the above. So no love there. Really, all I want is for the semi-important stuff to be "off-box", ideally a local image, since my really critical stuff is already off-site using a remote backup service. At this point it doesn't look likely that we can replicate the PC backups off the box, but I'm not too worried about those either.

So until something better comes along, you can actually still use NTBackup if you want, you just can't back up the fancy logical volume in WHS (which makes up most of the D: drive). What you can back up is C:\, SystemState, and then your WHS shares over the network (i.e. you would add \\ server\users) to your backup selections. Could you do a bare-metal restore from this? Ehm, probably not. But's it's something I'd try, and maybe some day I will. In the meantime, it allows you to use a familiar, reliable backup tool to offload important and critical files to another device or elsewhere on your home network.

So is this enough? If your critical data is covered, then yeah, I think so. You could avoid ALL of the issues above I suppose and run WHS inside Virtual Server or Hyper-V, but then I think you lose one really nice thing that WHS lets you do - use cobbled-together hardware you already had laying around the house. The way the logical volume system works, its designed for that, with disk drives that WILL fail in mind. I've had two drives fail in mine in the last year, and in both cases the process to replace them was pretty painless. Your mileage will definitely vary.