That’s regrettable, but such issues are not uncommon when you’re trying to live in a multiplatform world. The only way I’ve been able to back up the system reliably is by using a USB hard drive connected to the MacBook Air directly. WHS Connect running on Mac OS Lion isn’t all that useful. I also considered using a more involved method to back up a Lion system to WHS, but it involved installing a Linux-based virtual machine on the WHS system, at which point my eyes glazed over and I gave up. I tried a third-party plugin, Orbital Backup for Home Server 2011, but it refused to install on my WHS 2011 system, so that was a no-go. Unfortunately, doing so merely gives you an easier way to access the server Time Machine still won’t work. The other approach is to use root access on the Mac to rename the Mac OS Launchpad, and then to install WHS Launchpad. In order for this to work, though, you do need to know the actual IP address of your WHS system. One way is simply to use Finder: Click the Go menu, and then click Connect to server.

It’s still possible to use WHS with Lion, however. At that point, the Mac OS Launchpad app displaced the WHS Launchpad (the names and locations were identical), and Microsoft hasn’t fixed the problem. WHS 2011 actually worked pretty well with Apple’s Time Machine backup tool–until Apple shipped Lion. I use Home Server 2011 as my primary repository for backups, as well as for storing benchmarks, downloaded files, and media. Now let’s turn to an area that’s not so hot: Windows Home Server. What follows are the details of how I did that, and how well the arrangement has worked. Adopting this setup does mean enduring a few hassles, but overall the two operating systems play nicely together, if you set them up properly. But at some point shortly after installing the Parallels/Windows 7 combo, I stopped using the VM, opting instead to integrate Mac OS into my existing, Microsoft-based environment. Originally, I had intended to load most of my Windows applications onto the new laptop, using the Parallels virtual machine software. So I bought a 13-inch MacBook Air configured with a 256GB solid-state drive. Some missed the boat on the trackpad others had lower-quality displays. Even so, I might have waited, except that the Ultrabooks I’d previewed to that point seemed uninspired–with clunkier hardware than the Air offered and various odd compromises. At that point, the first Ultrabooks had been announced but were not yet shipping. About nine months ago, I acquired a 13-inch MacBook Air.

Make mac look like windows