Network Attached Storage

I suspect that one day soon I will update this blog more frequently but for now I will describe my latest project: installation and configuration of a Network-attached storage (NAS) device. http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci214410,00.html .

I decided to purchase a drive that has 1 terabyte (that is, a thousand gigabytes) of storage. My purpose is to be able to back-up every computer in my house as well as share photos, pictures, videos and other data documents in one location accessible by any computer. My choice of NAS was the Maxtor Shared Storage device. There are several nice features that I like about this product: 1) It has a media feature that works with iTunes which allows any authorized computer running iTunes in my house to play the music stored there. 2) Users can be created with permissions to access certain folders but not others and 3) It comes with back-up utility software.

So I connected the drive to my home network, which assigned it an ip address, installed the software, created users and then copied my iTunes folder over to it. A neat utility I downloaded months earlier is called SyncToy which allows me to copy any new songs I download from the iTunes online music store from my computer to the shared NAS device with the click of one button. This way I keep the NAS device in Sync with my computer to share the music and other files with the rest of the family on their computer. I hope to provide more information on this product soon. Below is a link to SyncToy and a description of how it works.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx