How do you manually allocate space on a server with multiple drives?

Question

I'm setting up a home server that is running Windows Home Server, and I'm really new to this. It has two hard drives, but when setting up shared folders I cannot figure out how to specify which drive the folder should reside on. (Is this even possible?). I want one of the folders to have critical stuff that needs to be backed up, and the second to have non-critical stuff that is not backed up. This seems like it would be easier to restore my critical data from a remote backup if one drive fails. Or maybe this is silly and unnecessary? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Not at all silly,

I work in data recovery and answer questions on sites like superuser while I watch progress bars when the hardware repairs are done and we switch to software to finish the job.

Your non essential data, browser history and temp files really don't need to be backed up. The essential files obviously should be. Non system folders can be created on either drive then shared. For system folders like the Documents or My Documents folders, they will already be in a default locations on the system drive. You can right click on the My Documents(or other system folder) in most cases, select properties and in a click or two move the folder to a different(presumably larger) drive. Given the fact you're running home server which is reasonably robust it should shuffle all share information and direction to the new location. Backing up may require a few settings changes or an update of your backup software at this point, but once done should be easy to restore assuming your backup is on a different drive, device or location.