Put those outdated or extra computers to good use

Do you have extra/outdated computers (or just hard drives) in your storage room/garage that you don't know what to do with? Tired of wasting time looking for data, not knowing in which drive it resides? Tired of not having your data accessible to all computers all the time?  Would you like a central location for important files and backups?  NAS - Network Attached Storage - is what you need, and it can be done for little, or no, cost.

Network Attached Storage provides a central place to securely store and share all of your data. To easily understand, NAS can be thought of as a hard drive or multiple hard drives for your entire network rather than for just one computer. With Network Attached Storage, multiple PCs and Macs (even those connected via the Internet) can instantly access the same shared files. For added functionality, printers can be attached to a NAS device to share the printer between all computers on the network and multimedia content stored on the NAS can be streamed to TVs throughout the network.

There are plenty of NAS options that you can purchase that are fantastic, such as the TeraStation by Buffalo Tech, or one of Seagate's solutions are just two examples.  However, my goal in this article is to explain you how you can do this with what you might already have.  Or, if your business is on a tight budget, then this could be a lifesaver of an option.

Your basic requirements are a computer with enough storage to make this a viable "server", the FreeNAS download, and a network card.  You'll use the keyboard and monitor to set it up, but will remove them later - it will be a "black box" which you manage via a web interface.

There are plenty of articles describing every step, so I don't want to re-hash what they've done, what I'd like to do is give you examples of what we use this for.

• File Server (central location for all shared files)
• Print Server (no more hoping a co-worker's computer is on so you can print)
• Backup location (QuickBooks, ACT!)
• iTunes server (everyone with iTunes can listen to the music on this machine)
• Web Server (used for testing before you publish)
• Automated Backups (each user's computer is automatically backed up to this machine)

Here are some follow-up links if you want more details:
FreeNAS site
YouTube how-to
YouTube in-depth video
Daily Cup of Tech how-to

Hope this helps you improve your work flow! Thanks...