Windows Home Server (WHS), the Microsoft (News - Alert) OEM network storage solution released earlier this year, is having issues with files getting corrupted.

Microsoft has stated in a statement that, when a user uses certain programs to edit files on a home computer that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when they save them to the home server.

Microsoft Corp. reportedly has asked WHS users not to edit files stored on their backup systems with several of its programs, including Vista Photo Gallery and Office’s OneNote and Outlook, as well as files generated by finance software, such as Quicken and QuickBooks.

“Until an update for Windows Home Server is available, we recommend that do not use the programs to save or to edit program-specific files that are stored on a Windows Home Server-based system,” said Microsoft.

The programs listed in the statement include Windows Vista Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, OneNote 2003, OneNote 2007, Outlook 2007, Microsoft Money 2007 and SyncToy 2.0 Beta.

“A few people in the Community Forums have reported data corruption when saving files, on WHS, from applications including Windows Vista Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Microsoft Office OneNote 2007, Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 and SyncToy 2.0 Beta,” WHS team stated in a blog. “Additionally some applications, like Microsoft Money and Microsoft Outlook, do not support storing files on shared folders.”

Designed to be a thin version of Microsoft's Windows Server -- which uses an Intel Xeon or AMD (News - Alert) Opteron server processor as a foundation for enterprise software -- WHS allows backup, remote access, and file sharing.

According to a Computerworld Report, Microsoft has blamed the problem on a glitch within Windows Home Server's shared folders, and the company has stated that it had reproduced the bug and would post any new information to the document tagged as KB946676.

“Our development team is working full-time through the holidays to diagnose and address this issue,” WHS team stated on the blog.

Till then, Microsoft has asked users to “make sure that you have a backup copy of any important program files before you store these files on a system that is running Windows Home Server.”

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Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

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