By Gregg Keizer
May 16, 2008

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.