FYI You posted in the EX-470 thread, but same processes apply in most cases.
Generally problems are the result of Harddrive failures. The Server being headless is a big part of people not seeing problems coming until they take the system completely down.
There is a FREE addin called (Smart) that would have warned you long ago that the drives were having problems. That one app imho is a must have on a headless system and HP should have had something like it when the systems came out. But they didn't and "Matt" the programs author/ builder did and it is a must have.. It makes the server easier to run.
But:
To answer your question "How to get your data" if the drive/s are not completely dead then you can pull them out and plug them into another PC via a usb to sata dock or if you are able to open a desktop you could attach one that way.
Either way, you will need to turn off hidden files and folders and then you will be able to see what is on the drive.
If all goes well, you should be able to move your data to somewhere else.
I am assuming you have windows xp/7/8/10 some form of windows.
"The server being to hard to work with" well", not really, if you have the Smart app installed and a usb to sata dock and a couple of extra harddrives on standby, the system is pretty easy to work with.
You check the warnings, clean the dust bunnies, back it up somehow and enjoy.
But is does take some time and some clicking to get use to it. And one should always have some kind of a backup of your data outside the server (just in case).
My Cloud are pretty easy, I have some family that I have given My Books to back in the day because they did not have any kind of backup and when their PC died, they would lose everything. External backup is better then nothing.
Some people are going to NAS but you still have a learning curve on how to use it, it still has drives that need to be watched and will die. The NAS decides what apps you can run on it and the price so you would need to research what you are getting and what it will let you do..
Windows home server is windows, you can run most anything on it and if you have a drive that fails, you can pull it out and still be able to read the data, on a NAS, that is not always the case, the data may be in some other format that is not readable outside the NAS.
Good Luck on getting your data back, if you decide to give WHS another try there are plenty of people that are willing to help answer any questions you might have. The home server days are numbered as Microsoft has turned it's back on it and we all may be looking at something else down the road, but until then, I will be using mine and watching these threads to see if I can help.
Let us know how it's going and if you need any other help.
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