Project

[The Astroman]

OK, so here's what I wanna do;
I'm gonna set up a NAS for backups, but it will also be used as a medium to store familly pictures, videos, music etc.

1) What NAS do you reccomend, and what capacity? There will be 3 computers connected to it, and 2 via a WLAN. They will be backing up their important files and configs onto the NAS, but also uploading new pics/music etc. There's my PC that would be wired and the other two that wouldn't.

2) Is there a software that would allow me to create a database in which I could add pictures and sort them into categories, that would be installed on the NAS (a master database), and then I would install a slave version of the software on the other PCs and they could access the database and view pictures?

3) What kind of software would I need to stream music and videos off the NAS? Is it even doable considering 2 computers would be streaming via the WLAN...

4) My mom has tons of pictures on film (35mm) that she would like to scan using a film scanner, as to get excellent quality and be able to share them using the digital environnment. What scanner would you reccomend? I have about 2000 pictures to scan, so a fast scanner would rock my world... LOL...

 

[The Astroman]

*bump*

 

[Geoff]

I think your trying to over-complicate the issue.

Depedending on the size you want, heres a 160GB and a 500GB.

If I understand you right, you want the NAS to be used for backups and to store general data as well, so you can access the files from any computer in your house, correct?

If so, you can simply change the directory of the "My Documents", "My Music", and so on, to the file path of the NAS. And if you have the same accounts set up on all the PC's, you can access your documents and favorites simply by logging onto any PC on your network.

Just make sure to have seperate folders for each user.

As for streaming music, I'm not sure how on a stand alone hard drive, but if you had it in a computer, you could run Windows Media Encoder 9 and have it stream over the network.

If you need help on a backup solution, I created a batch file which I set to run on logon, which would copy any new and modified files over to the backup drive, or in your case, the NAS.