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The Windows Home Server Bug, And A Lost Opportunity To Fix It

On Monday, Microsoft's Windows Home Server team posted an update on their blog about the persistent data loss bug that has been hanging around since October 2007. At this point, the group says they have a handle on the problem, but they don't expect to have a complete fix until June.

Data-loss bugs are bad, bad, bad. When files on the customer's computer are lost or damaged by a program they installed, they tend to be just a bit cranky. This Windows Home Server bug is an order of magnitude worse. Normally when software hoses the user's data, the support guy's glib retort is, "Can you restore from your last backup?" In this case, WHS was supposed to be keeping the backups! Gulp.

One of Microsoft's own technical evangelists, Volker Will, blogged in January about his experience with Windows Home Server. Poor Volker lost a lot of his data due to WHS problems -- not once, but twice. He also experienced the worst of all possible disasters related to computer failures, spousal anger. After an experience like that, the anger and frustration were understandably dripping off his blog post.

On the other side of the coin, I can't imagine what I would do if I were a member of the Windows Home Server team and I saw Volker's post. My first impression would be to strangle the guy. Not because he insulted our product, but because he didn't tell our team! I don't know any of the developers on the WHS team, but I am a developer myself. I have spent hours with customers trying to diagnose problems. Once, I even purchased a new computer for a user to get the old one that exhibited a bug I could not reproduce. Every developer knows that if you can consistently reproduce a problem, you can fix it.

Read the WHS team blog and you can see Microsoft had a heck of a time finding and diagnosing these data loss problems. They desperately needed to find test cases. So a Microsoft employee who experiences the problem and can reproduce it twice would be a godsend, especially in mid-January when the root of the problem still may not have been clear.

I don't care how big Microsoft has gotten. Every employee at the company should feel that they are part of the test team. When you work at Microsoft and you encounter a serious data-loss bug that also has been reported by customers, your personal blog isn't the first place to report it.

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