High Tech Household

Have you ever thought about setting up a home server? Especially if there are more than a couple of computers on your home, it can make a lot of sense to have one machine where everyone’s data is stored. This also makes backups a whole lot easier for the local administrator, i.e., you. A NAS might be just the thing.

‘NAS’ is short for Network Attached Storage. Basically, it’s a machine on your network that serves as a big hard drive for the users of that network. They’re very common at large- and medium-sized businesses, and they’re popping up in small businesses and homes more and more. On a home network, you can give each of your users a chunk of disk space on the NAS for their documents and media. It’s not recommended to actually install programs to the NAS, but this stuff, especially photos, music and video, can quickly take up a very substantial amount of hard drive space. Having it all in one place reduces duplication, and allows to set up a workable backup regiment.

A consumer-level NAS works more like a little network device, rather than a computer, even though, deep down, it is basically just a PC. You usually don’t actually interact with the operating system on the device, but instead a web interface or a piece of software that you install on some other machine on your network. There are even some routers to which you can connect storage (via USB, usually) that can then act like a NAS themselves. Ars Technica recently had a quick write-up on NAS devices; it’s worth reading.

If you’re a little more technically savvy, you might consider just buying a smaller desktop whose sole purpose would be to store your users’ files. Then you could dispense with the web interfaces and whatnot, but you would have to be comfortable with configuring those file services yourself. Microsoft sells Home Server to help with that, as well. Any number of Linux distributions would be ideal for this purpose too. You could also be sure that it includes a DVD burner to make those backups even easier. A home server, though, is a bit more than a NAS. And it’s enough of a topic for a whole other article..