Home servers are awesome, so congrats on being awesome and maintaining a Server that allows you to share data with all the devices on your network. From anywhere, you can have remote access to your devices at home, which allows you to monitor your network’s health. Also, you can centralize your backups, so if safety and security are your things, you’re totally covered. That being said, in order to manage all that security, you’ll need to regularly maintain your home server. Here’re some tips on how to do that.

Regularly Backup Your Home Server

Anything can happen natural disasters, successful hacking attempts, hardware failure, etc. If your server goes down, you can quickly recover it with a backup file. Ideally, you should create a backup file once per day. If you’re short on time and not worried about the data loss, a weekly backup should suffice. Save the backup data to an external hard drive and store that hard drives in a safe space, such as a fireproof and waterproof safe.

Suppose you don’t have a backup and you suffer server data loss? Not all is lost; server recovery is possible, but you’ll need to employ the services of a third-party data recovery specialist. Not all are created equal. You need a security expert trained in advanced media recovery solutions; for example, server data recovery by Secure Data Recovery uses only the most up to date security systems and recovers your data in a specialized laboratory that ensures your hardware isn’t corrupted by debris or anything else.

Monitor Home Server Performance

Monitoring a server isn’t the simplest thing, but hey neither was setting up that awesome server, to begin with. In order to successfully monitor Performance, you must establish a baseline. Microsoft recommends that you measure your server’s performance at various times and under different load conditions. This will create the baseline, which you can then compare to subsequent performances to ensure the server is performing optimally.

Monitoring the server’s performance has a lot of benefits, including troubleshooting. It also improves the server’s overall performance by improving the disk I/O and reducing the over disk usage. Finally, it cuts down on the network traffic load on the server, which is important if you plan to grow your server.

Keep in mind, if you’re doing a lot of web browsing you may better protect your server by browsing anonymously. This can be done with a VPN or using one of the free proxy servers available to you. Check out this list of 110 free proxy servers to find one that will help you stay anonymous online.

Monitor Web Server Requests

You should be monitoring all incoming HTTP requests. There  are a few websites that allow you to do this, but server experts StackOverflow.com recommend using Fiddler to monitor the requests. You can configure Fiddler to work as a reverse proxy or write a FiddlerScript rule. Either way, you will be configured so that any traffic sent to the HTTP is auto-sent to a different port.

Monitor Your RAID Alarms

You should check your RAID status pretty frequently to ensure it’s operational. You can use a service for this, or you can detect a drive failure on your own. You can query your array status by monitoring the RAID alarms.

Overall, if you’re proactive about monitoring your memory, disk space, and RAID performance you should be okay. You’ll probably want to check your modem communications to ensure your Internet connection is working at maximum capabilities, and of course always remember to back up your server to ensure you don’t lose your important data.

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