NAS or just regular external drives?

[sdsumike619]

How do I know if I need a NAS device or just a couple of external hard drives? I have a small network (two computers) for business and right now things are a mess in that files are scattered and unorganized. What I want to do is have one network drive that both computers can save to and access files from. And then another drive which will serve as an incremental backup for the first drive. Then on top of that, I also want to subscribe to one of the offsite backup services..

[Poppa_Meth]

I think a NAS would be easier for you if you have multiple computers accessing the shares. You can build one easy enough out of an old computer if you happen to have one lying around. I'm using FreeNAS from www.freenas.org right now. It isn't nearly as good as some paid solutions but it's getting better.

[sdsumike619]

I don't understand what the purpose of the freenas program is for? Is the NAS hard drives, or is it an entire system

[Poppa_Meth]

FreeNAS is a small embedded operation system. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, which can mean a lot of things. In my case, I took an old Pentium II rig I had lying around, left one tiny 6GB HDD in it from the original configuration and then slapped a 250GB HDD in there, with room for more in the future. I installed FreeNAS on the small drive and set it up with it's own IP address. Then I mounted the 250GB drive as a storage volume and places several Shares on it, basically folders such as Music 1, Music2, etc. Then I hooked it to my router via ethernet. Now all I have to do on my computer it go to start>run and type \\(insert IP address). This will display all the shares for me to access just like I would any other folders on my local machine. FreeNAS also lets you operate the system via a Web interface so no keyboard, monitor, etc is needed on the old PC acting as my server.