It's Serving Home
I guess one upside of the World Cup is that the English players got an extra week of holiday without the Germans grabbing all the best sunbeds.
The family PC has been creaking under a heavy load of photos (over 20K files now, because Pam likes to (a) shoot with the continuous mode and (b) keep everything "just in case"), videos, MP3s and Windows side-by-side greed. The machine only has a 160GB hard disk. "Only" - hah. Worse, it's a small(-ish) form-factor machine and I have yet to figure out a way to get a second drive into the cage without applying a hacksaw. (I'm assuming there's a crucial screw or two somewhere but I have yet to locate them).
Rather than get into Ghosting and whatnot, I decided to go the home server route and invested in an Acer H340 device. So far so good. Easy to set up, it sits in a corner outside the office, cable-connected to the ADSL modem/router. I got the family machine talking to it without incident and this morning it was already happily running a backup on that machine.
I'll start investigating use of the shared folders tonight. Paranoia dictates the taking of an independent external copy of all the media files before I start removing stuff from the clients.
Form factor is acceptable: it's about a 12" cube. Takes up to four drives - I have 2x1TB, which ought to be enough for now.
Good grief. "Ought to". "For now".
My first job in computing was on an IBM 370 with four 330MB (yes, "mega") hard drives; I remember enthusing to people about the monstrous capacity we had available.
The family PC has been creaking under a heavy load of photos (over 20K files now, because Pam likes to (a) shoot with the continuous mode and (b) keep everything "just in case"), videos, MP3s and Windows side-by-side greed. The machine only has a 160GB hard disk. "Only" - hah. Worse, it's a small(-ish) form-factor machine and I have yet to figure out a way to get a second drive into the cage without applying a hacksaw. (I'm assuming there's a crucial screw or two somewhere but I have yet to locate them).
Rather than get into Ghosting and whatnot, I decided to go the home server route and invested in an Acer H340 device. So far so good. Easy to set up, it sits in a corner outside the office, cable-connected to the ADSL modem/router. I got the family machine talking to it without incident and this morning it was already happily running a backup on that machine.
I'll start investigating use of the shared folders tonight. Paranoia dictates the taking of an independent external copy of all the media files before I start removing stuff from the clients.
Form factor is acceptable: it's about a 12" cube. Takes up to four drives - I have 2x1TB, which ought to be enough for now.
Good grief. "Ought to". "For now".
My first job in computing was on an IBM 370 with four 330MB (yes, "mega") hard drives; I remember enthusing to people about the monstrous capacity we had available.