Need some help here guys on home server setup

Cius

Cius

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So I have a few needs I need to fill. One is that we only have laptops at home and external HDD's and we have twice now had laptops crash or have their HDD's crash when the laptop got dropped so we are worried about loosing data, photo's etc. I was leaning towards either a home server to do file management on or perhaps some kind of NAS solution.

A secondary issue I have is that my new piece of crap hi-sense TV's in built media player plays almost none of my video files so I need to stream to the TV somehow. Not really keen on the cromecast thing as I have heard of a few guys who struggle to get files to play via cromecast and running an HDMI from my laptop across the room is annoying.

Anyways, I was thinking a home server will solve most of my problems. It can be the central file server and can connect to a google drive or drop box account to back up our more important files. It can also sit by my TV and have a permanent HDMI cable connected to the TV as well as stream showtime etc. Assuming it is easy to remote connect in to the home server via the wifi it seems to be an elegant solution to my backup problems as well as my entertainment issues.

Can anyone comment on the above plan and/or point out a better option? If the above does sound good what would I need to get this going and what is a good source for a box that could serve as said home server. Been so long since I bought a PC not from work I am not even sure what spec would be needed for this and where a good place is to buy so any and all advice is welcome. Curious to know what other people are doing to solve similar issues in their lives. I have heard of a few guys buying mini-PC's for this but the only one I have seen was an Apple machine that looked awesome (and was the size of a small pizza box) but also cost a huge amount. I am really looking for a more value for money option and something that I could set up raid or dual drive backup on for bigger files as well as the drop box/google drive auto backup.
 
Maybe one of these HP Microserver.

or I personally use QNAP TS-341

On special today WD Red 3TB

Storing data is expensive. Making data redundant is more expensive and backing up data is really expensive. (Depends on how many TB)

My 15TB of data cost about 20k just to Raid 5 it reliably. Backing up critical files, docs, photos, etc, I use another 6TB external device that no one touches. Once a week it receives a few gig then goes back to sleep. Also I have another copy of "cannot loose files" in the 2TB paid cloud account.

It all comes down to how valuable your data is to you and how much you prepared to spend to protect it.
 
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You cheapest solution would be to plug your hard drive into your router.
Put a table under you screen with laptop on and HDMI cable plugged in.
Remote desktop into your laptop from tablet/phone.
FTP to the Hard Drive.
Backup everything to Google Drive and your HD

Cheap and fast solution
 
Mine is not too fancy. Centralised media on Linux server with samba, wireless router with gigabit and raspberry pi's with xbmc as clients. Only really need documents backed up on computers so I generally use Dropbox or Google Drive. Something like Syncbackfree can be used to schedule other backups directly to server.
 
since you seem to be okay with the possible noise that may come from running your media/file server next to your tv, go with the hp micro server.. throw some wd red drives in there, preferably in a raid array of sorts.. pop windows on there, with xbmc to run your media.. get yourself a graphics card around the 700 - 1000k price, dont need much more than that to stream and watch media.. connect the hp micro server to your network and then use microsoft sync toy to sync any files from your laptops to your file server on set schedules, as well as to sync files to your dropbox folders.. this is the easy way out..

for the more elegant, and no noise next to your tv option, pop the hp micro server in a room elsewhere, still accessible to your network.. get a rapsberry pi 2+ b with something like raspbmc or osmc installed, pop your media in a shared folder on your server, and add this share as a source on your raspberry pi, to stream your media.. if you need windows for streaming, get the more expensive intel compute stick..
 
mintydroid said:
Mine is not too fancy. Centralised media on Linux server with samba, wireless router with gigabit and raspberry pi's with xbmc as clients. Only really need documents backed up on computers so I generally use Dropbox or Google Drive. Something like Syncbackfree can be used to schedule other backups directly to server.
Click to expand...

This.

Only difference is my "server" is a freenas box with pnp enabled so it's realy easy to access media from most devices.

Hardware i use.

Chassis - CFi 2060 mini-itx case ( also works as 4 bay NAS storage chassis )
ASRock® Intel Q1900 ITX, Intel® J1900 Quad-Core SOC Processor 2.0GHz
Kingston KVR13LS9S6/2 Valueram , 2Gb , 204 pin so-dimm
USB Flash drive (For FreeNAS OS)

Now just add the drives you want, the chassis can take 4x3.5" drives. The ASRock board doesn't do raid but FreeNAS recommends you use their software raid anyway.

On the tv side you might want to get something other than a rpi as showmax hasn't mentioned anything about supporting it. Their only aiming at mainstream devices (apple sony ms).
Although showmax might work on chromium which is available in the repos for ubuntu arm that runs on the pi2.
 
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