Hi! I have a ton of video as well as a lot of pictures and no good backup system, so I would like to set up some sort of NAS or home server. There are windows, mac, and linux computers on the network. The network is both wireless (mostly) and wired. I have been experimenting some, but I didn't want to do it wrong and find out later, so I thought I would ask here.

The things I want it to do are:

- Automatic backup of documents and photos
- Direct wired connection to one (or more) computers for fast sending of HUGE files for editing
- Mirroring files to separate hard drives (not with RAID 1, because I don't want to have to have all the hard drives be equal sizes)
- Hiding some of those drives to other computers
- Reliability!!!

I was thinking about a Ubuntu setup with samba, but I thought I would check to see if there was something better first.

Thanks!!

I've been pleased with NASLite for old hardware. http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php

Using scripts on the client PC's to do the backups. Probably can't do any thing fancy re- RAID with it.

Thanks for the suggestion! Do you know it is easy to make it keep two copies of files on different drives?

I use SuSE (but Ubuntu is probably just as easy), Samba and rsync to backu up data between machines.
I use rsync as a cron job. I just do daily backups but if you look at the rsync resources there are ways to do more frequent backups as well as keeping history without blowing storage space.
I use Gigabit between main machines - I had to get latest drivers and do a bit of tweaking with buffer sizes - and now get between 300 and 450 Mbits/sec (limited by PCI and hard disk performance). No issues noticed with large files or with Samba.
rsync and cron can schedule backups to wherever, however, not true mirroring. Depends how real time you need it. There are Linux tools to notify you when something changes in a filesystem (can't remember what but I know they exist) so you could use that to trigger rsync.
I use rsync to make backups to a separate drive and then Samba to publish a read only view of the back up data. Samba can control access to data independently of core file/directory permissions.
I'm still running SuSE 10.0 as my production server and it's fair to say that the only unreliability problems have been when I've decided to tinker with it! In terms of coping with either large numbers of files or large files there have been performance issues reported with filing systems and Samba but I haven't experienced them myself. Worth looking at what other people say on choice of filesystem (I'm now with ext3 rather than ReiserFS but have heard that XFS is better suited to large files).

Thanks, I have a test machine to work on this for, so I will try what you suggested. If anyone knows the name of the program to see when files have changed that would be great!

Try monit: http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Inter...onit-494.shtml