A couple of you expressed interest in our fileserver, so I thought I'd give you an overview of what we're up to. We're to the point right now that our personal computers are filling to the brim with photos, MP3s and other miscellaneous stuff. It slows down the computers and beyond that, we're not doing much in the way of back-up since it's just too overwhelming. Bad bad bad computer nerds. Lastly, we want to get our paper documents (except the things like birth certificates and car titles) into digital form so they aren't bogging down my office. So the goals are the following:
* free up space on our personal computers
* automate backups
* reduce redundant data (i.e. data such as MP3s that we have on multiple computers)
* transform paper into bytes
Servers are really expensive, it turns out, but luckily we have the chops to DIY on this one. So we ordered parts off of NewEgg. Luckily for me, Matt loves to research this sort of thing and figured out what we needed. It's going to be your typical computer with a couple of differences.
The biggest one is the hard drives … they are LARGE. And we're planning to set them up in a RAID 5 configuration. Which is a fancy way of saying we're setting up the hard drives so that they automatically set away (back up) enough of the data so that they are able to recreate data if a drive fails. The other main difference is that we will set it up as a server on our home network so that we can map various directories as drives on our other computers.
So currently we're waiting on the parts to show up … then we'll be building the computer. After that we've got to migrate all of the files and I think there will be quite a bit of organizing as we migrate. Then we're going to start the scanning. Yikes.
My husband built a server a few years ago, and I believe he bought the parts from NewEgg as well. He hosted his website from it and a few other things. I don't ask many questions when it comes to that kind of stuff.
Niel did something similar with our photos. It's on a different hard drive. I like your paperless idea, but I am paranoid about the computer dying. And those files being gone forever.
Would you and your husband like to fly to NY and build me a file server? Isabella can entertain Tabby, and I will sit and watch you two in awe of your abilities.