Sharing on my home network & photographs storage

I think most of the average income’s household will now have more then 1 computer in their house and mostly have to go online at the same time. So, my sharing here may not be new to most of you and probaly you have something similar found in your home’s setup.

I will only going to go through the basic network setup in brief as that is not what my main sharing is. The home network is the normal setup where my personal computer acts like a “server”, connecting to the wireless router, Linksys’s WRT54GS with Speed booster, connected to an Aztech’s DSL605EU ADSL Modem and connecting to the broadband service provider (Internet) and also providing the security via a Firewall. The “server” serves as the data storage center and connections to one Color Printer and a Laser Printer. The laptops and pocket pc are connecting to the network via the WiFi. Looks similar with your home network’s setup ?

The area I would like to emphasize on is how both of us manage the massive photographs that we taken over the time and tried to minimize the risks of loosing all the photographs that are stored on the computer. I bet everyone heard the phrase “Don’t Put All Your Eggs Into One Basket“, that is exactly what we are trying to do in order to minimize the risks of loosing all of them. ( well, I said “minimize” and not “never” because we will still eventually lose all of them if let say “touch-wood” that some one got in and take away our computer or there is a fire in the house we are staying and burn them away ).

If you look at the illustration I drew up there, you will notice that there is 2 x HDDs that are side by side and named 320G RAID 1. That is my main C: Drives that holding the OS and also where we stores all our newly taken pictures. I normally download the pictures directly on the PC where Sock Peng will download on her laptop and moves them into the PC which acts as the file server. With configures it to RAID 1, they are basically mirrored and the system is protected against a single HDD failures… Unless both of them go bad at the same time, if not… at least one of them will be still running and minimizing the data lost. You can read more about RAID 1 on WiKi if you are interested. Do aware that since they are in RAID 1, 2 x 320G HDDs will only have the capacity of 320G and not 640G where the OS will only see 1 x HDD Volumn and not 2.

From time to time, I will burn a collections to DVD-R as backup and then moves those photographs from the C: into my 500G E: Drive. There are 2 reasons that I am doing this, first is to have 2 copies of the same photographs and secondly, I found that once photographs are put into DVDs, they are seldom been access anymore and hence having them in HDDs allows them to have more frequent access.

So, basically this is how we have our setup and having a centralized file server with some measures that minimizes loses of photographs we taken. There are other options like external RAID, Network Storage, different modes of RAID which required more HDD configuration but RAID 1 is probably the cheapest to begin with among other RAID mode configurations.

We are using the on motherboard’s RAID with software on Intel® Matrix Storage Technology. Following are some other external storage / RAID storage you can consider for those that does not has built on support for their motherboard but wish to add RAID features or simply have off PC 2nd backup storage.