Not exactly sure if this belongs in General or Networking, but I'll give it a shot here.
My home network currently consists of a low tier fibre connection, with the gateway connected to a few TVs around the house and then switches that connect to my wired computers and a router that provides wifi.
Computers consist of my main desktop (in sig), a couple primary laptops (mine and the missus), an old PhenomII X3 HTPC connected to the main TV, an rPi running XMBC connected to another TV, a few random laptops, and two Samsung smartphones. There's also a couple small android tablets floating around.
Right now most media files are on my desktop on a shared folder, and I just access them through the network. Backups are done on my desktop to another drive using Acronis True Image, and I occasionally (monthly or so) do a backup of the desktop and the two laptops to a portable HDD that I keep in a fireproof safe. I also occassionally manually move pictures from the laptops and my desktop My Pictures folder to folder on my desktop to try and consolidate them.
Sitting in mothballs I have an old single core Sargas computer, an E2140 C2D, and my previous i5-2500k desktop. I would like to turn one of them into a home file server of some kind, and am looking for advice. I would like the system to do the following.
- Store multimedia files (movies, music), archived data, etc
- Store pictures pulled from cameras and phones
- Store backups from all the devices
- Provide easy access to the consolidated pictures, and easy upload. Ideally, if the camera was plugged into a computer it would first try to upload the pictures to the file server rather than My Pictures
- Serve media and music to the HTPC, Pi, computers and phones/tablets, including downloading to phones/tablets for road trips.
What would be the best was to go about something like this? Throwing files on a shared drive using a Windows or Linux server would be pretty simple, but I'm not sure the best way to do the other things in a way that just works for other members of the house. Plex would seem to cover the media streaming/transcoding, but setting up Windows' My Pictures library to point to a network location seems to be a PITA. I'd appreciate any suggestions from anyone who's done something similar.
My home network currently consists of a low tier fibre connection, with the gateway connected to a few TVs around the house and then switches that connect to my wired computers and a router that provides wifi.
Computers consist of my main desktop (in sig), a couple primary laptops (mine and the missus), an old PhenomII X3 HTPC connected to the main TV, an rPi running XMBC connected to another TV, a few random laptops, and two Samsung smartphones. There's also a couple small android tablets floating around.
Right now most media files are on my desktop on a shared folder, and I just access them through the network. Backups are done on my desktop to another drive using Acronis True Image, and I occasionally (monthly or so) do a backup of the desktop and the two laptops to a portable HDD that I keep in a fireproof safe. I also occassionally manually move pictures from the laptops and my desktop My Pictures folder to folder on my desktop to try and consolidate them.
Sitting in mothballs I have an old single core Sargas computer, an E2140 C2D, and my previous i5-2500k desktop. I would like to turn one of them into a home file server of some kind, and am looking for advice. I would like the system to do the following.
- Store multimedia files (movies, music), archived data, etc
- Store pictures pulled from cameras and phones
- Store backups from all the devices
- Provide easy access to the consolidated pictures, and easy upload. Ideally, if the camera was plugged into a computer it would first try to upload the pictures to the file server rather than My Pictures
- Serve media and music to the HTPC, Pi, computers and phones/tablets, including downloading to phones/tablets for road trips.
What would be the best was to go about something like this? Throwing files on a shared drive using a Windows or Linux server would be pretty simple, but I'm not sure the best way to do the other things in a way that just works for other members of the house. Plex would seem to cover the media streaming/transcoding, but setting up Windows' My Pictures library to point to a network location seems to be a PITA. I'd appreciate any suggestions from anyone who's done something similar.
Facebook
Twitter