[ale] Home" Brew" Carbonite

[Greg Clifton]

Springboarding off the Pair of Twins Post, I have been thinking of building
a home brew storage server for several functions including media storage and
[automated?] backup over the internet of my family's computers. Carbonite @
$50/yr might not be so bad but x8 or more systems, surely I could build
adequate if not superior functionality for less than 2 yrs of service.
Currently have two kids running Macs the rest are running some flavor of
Windows, XP, Vista/7 plus I run a Ubuntu box as my home system.

I noticed a recertified HP home server box on Newegg for  ~$320 with 2x500GB
drives (2 open bays, 4 total), Sempron1.8 processor and 512Meg RAM and
windblows home server. They sold out of the single hard drive version for
$259 or I probably would have already bought it. So the question is, would
it be 'more better' to take such a box and slam in a couple of 1.5TB drives
or the like and load some Linux distro with necessary tools to be able to
dump audio + video and [automated] backups of all the family computers vs
using something like a Buffalo Terastation? Or does anybody have a better
idea?

Assuming the first option is viable, the next question is how to configure
such a box software-wise, I can handle the hardware, but wouldn't know where
to start with the software.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Greg Clifton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20091029/393f3270/attachment.html